In 1939, World War Two exploded across Europe.
The second world war was the largest single event in human history.
55 million people were killed.
As civilization in Europe collapsed,
one brave woman fought against the tide of war.
She saw that the second world war
presented an existential challenge.
It became the overriding moment of truth.
She faced the greatest evil in all of human history.
Could she survive?
This program was made possible in part
by the El-Hibri foundation,
embracing faith in humanity.
And the following institutions and individuals.
In 1940,
the Germans conquered France and most of Europe.
The second world war had begun.
Two years before the Americans entered the war,
Britain was on its own.
Desperate, they struck back at the Germans
in one of the few ways they could:
By creating a secret organization...
the special operations executive... the SOE.
The mission of SOE was not to gather intelligence;
it wasn't an espionage outfit.
It was, quote, "to set Europe ablaze."
It was to carry out sabotage, blow up trains, blow up boats,
canals, railroads,
to make contact with resistance groups in occupied Europe,
which could then be supplied from Britain.
In the past, wars were fought according to a book of war.
They're fought on battlefields between men in uniform.
But the SOE was completely different.
Churchill has an interest in kind of sabotage and subversion,
and is keen to try alternative forms of warfare.
Stop!
You, halt!
This alternative warfare
opened up a surprising opportunity
for one SOE recruit... Noor Inayat Khan,
the daughter of an Indian father and an American mother.
This is the first opportunity, really, I think,
for a group to actually employ women
and deploy them in an operational capacity.
To her fellow trainees, Noor was a mystery...
a petite woman with a Muslim name,
a refugee from German-occupied France.
They knew that for two years she had served
in the British women's auxiliary air force
as a radio operator and trained in the bomber command.
In many ways she was an ideal candidate for the SOE's French network.
She was plunged into this world
where everything that she thought about or did
related to the mission that she was being prepared for.
Surviving war office documents
describe Noor as emotional and imaginative.
Her superiors remarked on her selfless dedication.
The motive for her accepting the present task
is apparently idealism.
She was longing to do something more active in the prosecution of the war,
something which would make more call on her capabilities,
and perhaps demand more sacrifice.
There was something that seemed almost unworldly about her,
which struck them as exotic.
And given her name and her background,
I'm sure this played into a sort of sense of her.
Noor's instructors saw this uncommon idealism
as a distraction, another obstacle for a woman
already unprepared for the true reality of warfare.
These were male instructors who were used to teaching male recruits,
and all of a sudden, they'd been asked to train women.
And some of them were very reticent about doing that.
But her skill on the radio was unquestioned.
SOE radio operators were desperately needed in France.
Their average survival time was only 6 weeks
before the Nazi tracking trucks hunted them down.
This was the most important role
and the most difficult one to master,
so their training was much more extensive
than those that were going in as couriers or organizers, for example.
While Noor excelled at operating the radio,
she often lost focus when coding and uncoding the wireless messages.
Seizing on this weakness,
her instructors recommended against making Noor an agent of the SOE,
ignoring her skills, discounting her years of training,
and attempting to end her career before it even began.
Noor's damaging training reports were sent to London.
The head of SOE France was Maurice Buckmaster.
Maurice Buckmaster was, it seems to me,
a very unlikely character
who'd been part of the Ford motor company in Paris,
so he knew his way around Paris, he was fluent in French.
Buckmaster was enraged at Noor's evaluation.
He needed every radio operator available.
Get me Marks!
Leo Marks was the head of communications at SOE,
the chief cryptologist,
and a genius of codes and secret messages.
He was only 22 at the time.
He was essentially given the entire task
of figuring out which codes to use,
how to train agents to use them,
and how to train an army of cipher clerks
in how to decrypt those codes.
And that was a big task for somebody
who was essentially the age of a college student.
And his skill was that he could communicate with agents
and teach them how to use these codes.
Sir?
Come in, Marks.
I want you to look into the background of this trainee.
For Buckmaster, Marks was Noor's last, best hope.
The only way she could overturn the rejection
was to pass Marks' final review.
For some reason, Noor struggled with her coding,
and Marks would have to find out why.
Noor Inayat Khan?
Figure this girl out. Dig into it.
They've already rejected her?
Yes, and they went over my head to do it.
It's nonsense!
So, do whatever it takes, Marks,
and make sure she passes that final coding briefing with you as well.
We need this one.
I'll take care of it, sir. You can count on me.
The file Marks was given
contained all her training evaluations,
as well as a biography written in her own hand
during the recruitment process.
Marks set out to solve the mystery of Noor Inayat Khan.
The instructor is clearly biased...
perhaps because she's Indian.
And of all things, he said she refuses to lie.
How can you be an agent if you refuse to lie to the Germans?
Who is this girl?
Marks first looked into Noor's father, Hazrat Inayat Khan.
He was a Muslim, born in India,
a descendant of the famous Indian ruler, Tipu Sultan.
He was also a teacher of Sufism,
called to share the Sufi message...
a message that would one day have a profound impact on Noor, as well.
Sufis are Muslims, first and foremost.
And Sufis can be Sunni, they can be Shia,
they can be from any theological or any school of religious law.
They are engaged in practices that might be different
from the obligatory practices required of all Muslims,
whether they're singing or chanting or praying or the recitation of god's names,
god's beautiful names.
All of these practices are part of this tradition,
but the Sufi tradition sees itself as deeply
rooted in the foundational sources of Islam,
the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad.
And there was a great focus on music.
So music as a path to god,
music as a way of self-discovery,
and music as a way to actually take this message
and give it to the people.
In 1910, after Hazrat completed his Sufi training,
his master sent him off with a new challenge:
To bring his music and his message to the west.
In America, Hazrat travelled the country, performing his music.
But always my grandfather's deeper intention
was to spread a spiritual message,
and gradually he attracted those
who could hear that message behind his music
or within his music and began to gather around him.
It was in New York that Hazrat met and fell in love
with a young American woman, Ora Ray Baker,
a ward of her older brother, Perry Baker, who ran a yoga school.
He was young, musician, deeply spiritual and idealistic.
They were both young. They came from different worlds.
Sometimes opposites attract powerfully,
and it was in that context that they met and fell in love.
After weeks of courting,
Hazrat Inayat Khan asked Ora Ray to be his bride,
but her brother adamantly refused his permission.
And what is so ironic, I suppose,
is how Perry Baker was enamored of the esoteric traditions of the east,
but when it came to a family member, a woman in his family,
marrying a dark-skinned man, that was out of the question.
Despondent, Hazrat left America,
but Ora Ray soon followed him to London,
where they were finally married.
He set off to continue his teachings in Europe,
and in 1914, in St. Petersburg, Russia,
their first child was born.
They named her Noor-Un-Nisa, meaning, "light among women,"
and she would become the light of her father's heart.
She was from the very start, as a young child,
she was very generous and self-sacrificing.
And she was always concerned more about others than about herself
When Noor was 8, the family moved to Paris,
into a house given to them by a wealthy devotee of her father.
It was called Fazal Manzil, the house of blessings.
I grew up in this house,
and it was very obvious that it was a family home,
on the one side.
Even in the days of Noor's childhood here with her parents,
it was a family home, but at the same time,
it was a place for her father to receive his followers,
to give talks, to give classes, to hold meetings.
One of Hazrat's students from the Netherlands
painted a series of watercolours depicting life at Noor's home.
Surrounded by her father's students from all over Europe,
Noor felt deeply part of the larger whole,
regardless of skin colour, religion, or nationality.
And her father's teachings were at the centre of it all.
He was a figure of mythical proportions for all who knew him.
And the children were fascinated by him.
He was both their father, but he was at the same time
this larger-than-life figure who was, in a sense,
the father of everyone.
In the despairing years between the two world wars,
many Europeans had found themselves searching for meaning
and a new direction in their faith.
They were attracted to the house of blessings in Paris,
and especially the message of Hazrat Inayat Khan.
"La Ilaha Ill-Allah,"
which is often translated as "there is no god but god,"
but which means really, "there is nothing at all except the divine reality,"
which is to say that everything that exists is interconnected, interrelated,
and that everything comes from, and returns to, a singular being,
the one original, divine life.
The people who came for these talks
were probably upper class- educated people in any case,
and many of them came from Holland or Germany, Switzerland,
quite a few French intellectuals, as well.
It was an international crowd.
And his tradition came from a Koranic position
of recognizing that all of the Prophets of all of the world's faiths
are exemplars of one planetary message,
and that message is the message of the divine unity,
but a message which is conveyed in many forms.
Primarily, it was a path of service, service to the poor,
service to those in need, and a call to remember god.
Even as a child, Noor was drawn to this path of service,
one she would follow as she grew up.
I think it really marked them for life,
that the morals that he conveyed
were not just something you learned in Sunday school,
but a way of being, a way of living
that I could still see in my uncles and my mother throughout their lives.
There were very fundamental principles that
they really tried to live by and adhere to.
Whereas Noor's previous trainers saw her idealism as a flaw,
Marks saw it as a strength, and perhaps even
the key to making her a successful SOE agent.
He really took to Noor,
and I think he realized that actually she was
just somebody who was operating possibly on a higher moral plane,
and he seemed to be able to tap into that.
Marks learned that in 1927,
when Noor was only 13 years old,
her beloved father died on a trip to India.
And so his loss, his absence was an extraordinary loss.
It was like this brilliant sun had been shining
over everything and then suddenly departed.
When Noor's father died, she was very young.
She was a young teenager at the time
and took on a role of mothering her siblings
because her mother had fallen into a state
of deep depression, which lasted for years.
At the same time there was always a focus on the religious nature
of what this house represented.
In other words, the Sufi message that her father had brought.
And this was something that became part of everyday life.
His presence was, it seems, constantly felt.
After his death, Noor wrote in a letter
how, even in prayer, her father was near.
One night I woke and I felt so strongly the desire to say my prayers.
With all my soul I said them,
and in the silence of the night,
it seemed so clear that god heard me.
And just at my final words the clock struck,
is if a reply, 3 chimes which rang through the silence.
My father had told us that meant god granted our prayers.
And I fell asleep with my heart full of Joy.
As Noor grew older, she began to write children's stories.
It seems that her father's teaching
is something she wanted to not only live by,
but also to share with others.
This would have been in the writing of stories,
the morals of which then for children
would be along the precepts of what her
father's form of Sufism had taught her.
Great sun had a little
daughter with sun-ray hair and sky blue eyes,
and great sun loved her dearly
for when she played around the clouds,
the whole sky would ring with sweet laughter.
Noor loved to share her stories
with the children who visited the family home.
She published a collection of fables
called "twenty Jataka tales,"
just months before she and her family were forced to abandon the house
and flee during the Nazi invasion.
I can tell you that the most cherished possession that I have
is a manuscript written by her, by her own hand,
and this is one of the stories in the "Jataka tales."
I cannot imagine any relic more meaningful than this.
It's a picture of her very soul.
And in fact, all of the stories in the "Jataka tales"
are stories of nobility and sacrifice.
And she somehow must have known already at that stage in her life,
at a soul level, perhaps not consciously,
but she was moving toward this destiny, and she knew it.
She actually published a book for children:
"Twenty Jataka tales."
This bears a little study.
A lot of surprises in our miss Khan.
Somebody who is constantly escaping in some sense
into stories about magic animals
is somebody who is trying to make sense of the new world
that she's landed up in.
After reading the "Jataka tales,"
Marks knew he would have to approach Noor
in a completely different way.
She seemed other-worldly because she was from another world,
the world of her father.
In many ways she is a disciple of her father.
They are meant to actually be doing things in this world.
And that no doubt had an impact on her that...
You can see that her, you know, where she goes in her life,
the types of actions she engages in,
and a kind of activist ethics that she embodies,
is very much a part of this tradition.
That's why her stories were full of self-sacrifice.
That's why she refused to lie.
These were the values of her father and the
religious environment of her childhood.
Now Marks had what he needed to work with her effectively.
He sent for her.
If Noor had as much commitment to her code work as to her values,
she could not fail.
Mr. Marks. I'm here for my final briefing.
Miss Khan.
Have a seat.
I believe if one studies history,
this is one of the very few global situations
in which there is such a stark contrast in values
and such a clear moral imperative.
And I think she felt that imperative very viscerally.
I've read in your evaluations that you refuse to lie.
That's very noble.
It was my father's greatest lesson.
But when you fail to encode a message correctly,
you have lied.
I've what?!
Yes. Actually, you are very similar
to the characters in your "Jataka tales."
You've read my book?
Like the characters in your fables, Noor,
your central mission is to save lives.
But when you fail to encode a message correctly,
people will die.
The message will not get through.
You must tell the truth.
This provided the focus she needed,
the grounding in the real challenges she would face.
And now what had been more abstract
was thrust into a very tangible mold,
the mold of the coming conflict.
Marks watched as her technique began to improve.
Each time Noor finished encoding a line,
she closed her eyes and ran her finger over the phrase,
as if saying a prayer, tapping into a resource no other agent had.
And when she was done, her work was perfect.
There was a final task.
Marks must give Noor a bluff-check,
a secret signal by which they would know that she has been captured
and that the Germans, not Noor, were using her radio.
Now, one of the things Marks did
is he actually came up with a custom security check.
It was a special feature of all of her messages
that would make it possible for London to tell
whether or not she'd been captured,
even if she wasn't required to tell a lie.
All you need to do is remember to never to use
a key phrase with 18 letters in it.
Any other number, but not 18.
If we receive a message with 18 letters,
we'll know you've been caught by the Germans,
and they're using your radio.
18's my lucky number.
Yes, I can do that,
and I promise I'll not forget it.
I'll not disappoint you, Mr. Marks.
Well, I think it's clear
that Marks had a little bit of a crush on her.
She was very pretty, according to everybody at the time.
She was very smart.
And he had the opportunity to write a report that said,
"she is a terrible coder.
She will never survive behind enemy lines. Don't send her."
He had this chance, but he decided not to.
He wrote a glowing report, and as a result of that,
she was put on an airplane and sent into occupied Paris.
On the night of June 16,
Noor and two other women flew into France
in a single engine Lysander aircraft.
Once in Paris, she would adopt an entirely new identity,
that of a French children's nurse named Jean-Marie Renier.
But to London, Noor would be known by her code name, "Madeleine,"
radio operator for the Prosper network,
the largest and most important SOE group in France.
She would be the key link between the resistance and the British war office,
transmitting critical information,
and arranging for the drop of weapons and new agents
When Noor landed,
a man called Henri Dericourt was on the landing field
and was able to help her out of the airplane,
and loaded mail into the Lysander,
along with other agents who were returning to Britain.
Welcome to France, my dear friends.
You must hurry, there's not much time.
Take these documents to the pilot.
The headquarters of the Prosper network
were just to the Northwest of Versailles
in the national school of agriculture.
It was here that she began her first broadcasts back to London.
For every transmission
she must string out the 40 feet of antenna wire.
It took agents quite a while after they arrived
to establish themselves.
They would have to go to their safe house.
They would then have to make contact with London.
And Noor actually contacted London within 72 hours of her arrival,
which was pretty much unprecedented.
At the agricultural school,
Noor met Francis Suttill, code name "Prosper,"
the leader of the Prosper network.
Settling in, some of her fears diminished.
It was almost peaceful there, almost like home.
I've heard you're a very good operator, mademoiselle.
We're glad to have you with us.
But this is very dangerous work.
I'm very happy to be of service to the network.
Anything you need me to do, I can do it.
I promise I'll not disappoint you, sir.
You must never let down your guard.
The Germans are relentless.
I promise I'll be careful.
The organizer was out there trying to recruit people.
That was dangerous.
The courier was carrying messages, that was dangerous.
But by far the most dangerous was to be the wireless operator,
the radio operator.
For the Prosper network,
the Germans weren't the only threat.
Rumours surfaced that their own Henri Dericourt,
the man who had met Noor's plane, was a double agent.
Agents in London suspected Dericourt was employed both by the SOE F section
and by the Abwehr, the German counter-intelligence agency.
Dericourt, you are right on time.
It would explain why the Abwehr and the Gestapo
knew about f section headquarter's staff,
knew about incoming agents.
When a Lysander was returning to Britain,
it would often take documents that were too long
to be transmitted over wireless by the wireless operators.
There's evidence to suggest that Dericourt took that mail,
gave it to the Abwehr, which were then photocopied,
and then returned to Britain.
So everything that SOE headquarters was getting
had previously been seen by the Abwehr.
It meant that SOE was entirely compromised.
Within days of Noor's arrival,
the Gestapo struck, taking down the Prosper agents one by one.
It was the largest coup of its kind ever by the Gestapo in France.
There were 6 other wireless operators based in Paris at this time,
and all of them were either arrested or disappeared.
Even Francis Suttill, the leader of the Prosper network,
was no longer safe.
And as soon as one network or
subcircuit had been infiltrated by Abwehr agents,
then it was just going to lead, like a domino
effect, to the collapse of all of them.
Hey!
Suttill... Prosper himself... was arrested on June 24, 1943,
just 7 days after Noor joined his network.
It would appear that Prosper was doing very well.
Obviously, we know that the rate at which the Prosper circuit grew,
with all of these kind of subcircuits,
meant that sooner or later, it was inevitable
that it was going to be penetrated.
Many of the agents that were captured,
especially in northern France, in Paris,
were taken to 84 Avenue Foch in Paris.
The basement was basically a torture chamber, a jail.
Then there were administrative rooms,
and then at the top there were more cells, rooms,
just windowless rooms to interrogate people.
Here is the one we've been waiting for.
I see you have shown the poor judgement to resist.
I trust you will think more carefully here.
Take him to room number 3.
At 84 ave Foch in Paris,
Hans Kieffer was the senior intelligence officer,
but Ernest Vogt, as translator and interrogator,
spent the most time with captured agents.
Pierre Cartaud, a French collaborator,
was happy to be serving the Germans and eager to please.
Suttill's interrogation was especially long and brutal.
We know how difficult this is for you, Suttill,
you confessed your fears in your letters to your wife.
There's nothing to be ashamed of.
It's a variation off of good-cop/bad-cop.
There were those that would, you know,
smash them with a rubber truncheon and basically beat them up.
More effective, they discovered,
was this sort of friendly talking.
Have you no limits? Who's betrayed us?
We are all afraid in this war, Suttill.
We are all soldiers, so we are all men.
But you can free yourself of these fears.
There's nothing dishonourable in it.
Simply help us.
Honour means nothing to you.
Give us the locations of the hidden arms and explosives
so we can protect our soldiers.
Give yourself peace.
No one will be killed or harmed in any way.
I give you my word, as an officer of the third Reich,
an agreement between gentlemen.
You have my promise. Give us the locations.
After days of endless questioning,
the indications are that Suttill,
shocked and demoralized by the information the Germans had already had,
including copies of letters to his wife, gave in.
Actually, many of the agents once captured
did assume that they had a protected status,
that they believed what the interrogators told them,
unfortunately, that was not the case.
In the end, the Germans would arrest hundreds of people
after the Prosper collapse,
and confiscate countless tons of arms and explosives.
Suttill himself was held for two years in
Sachenhasuen concentration camp in Germany
before he was executed in 1945.
Noor's safe-house at the agricultural school was no longer secure,
but in a stroke of good luck,
Noor was warned before it was too late.
She had to flee immediately.
Where shall I go? Ride to Paris.
See if Monsieur Garry can get you to a safe house
if he has not already been taken away. But hurry!
With only her bicycle and a small bag,
Noor set off for Paris,
hoping there would be someone, anyone, who could help her.
To have this burden of not only being the radio operator
for this network that might be full of spies,
but to be the only person,
and knowing that if she did what was safe,
which was to head back to London or to go into hiding,
she would essentially cut off the operation
and make everybody else's sacrifice meaningless,
that was an enormous pressure for somebody, especially someone so young.
German soldiers were everywhere,
on the lookout for Prosper agents,
but Noor's inexperience may have worked to her advantage.
She hadn't been in Paris long enough to make friends... Or enemies.
Finally, Noor was able to transmit from a safe-house
she'd found through the local French resistance.
When she learned that she was the last radio operator left in Paris,
she knew she must quickly get word to London
that the Prosper network had been destroyed.
Each of us participates in defining the world
in which we live, in making the world what it is to become.
And she saw now that this was her moment to make her mark,
to say what she believed, and to say it not merely in words,
but to say it in action and in the most dangerous possible action.
Back in England,
an elaborate complex of SOE personnel awaited Noor's message.
Once received, the coded message was passed on to a decoder,
and then immediately sent to f section headquarters.
If the bluff check was included,
they knew the agent had not been captured.
What is it?
Oh, my god!
We have to get a message back to her.
It's the Prosper network.
Prosper? What's happened?
Take this down!
Most urgent to Paris station Madeleine.
Buckmaster, the head of F section of SOE
had requested that she return to Britain
because of her safety was at risk,
and she decided to ignore that instruction,
because she wanted to rebuild the network.
Everything depended on Noor.
Buckmaster offered to send a plane for her,
but she turned it down.
She was the last link to London.
Without her, there would be no way to deliver
supplies and guns to the resistance.
And a final lifeline would be cut for downed allied flyers in France,
desperate to escape the Germans.
She would stay.
The Germans used direction-finding vans,
which would be able to pinpoint the location
of an agent transmitting a message.
And they'd be able to do that probably within about 15 or 20 minutes.
The longer the radio operator stayed on the air,
the greater the danger.
It got to a point where they were not supposed
to stay in communication for more than 5 minutes.
It was said that the life of a wireless operator was about 6 weeks,
so it was an incredibly dangerous role, the most dangerous.
The ordinary idea is that idealism is not practical,
but in her case, the opposite proved to be true.
I believe it was her idealism itself that carried her through.
- .- Despite the danger,
Noor diligently kept the wire open to England.
She sent the names of the captured agents,
scheduled the weapons drops,
and continued to coordinate the escape of downed allied flyers
caught behind enemy lines.
There was no relief from her constant code work.
She had total focus now.
Imagine the hardest math problem you had to solve in high school.
Now imagine doing that every day,
and imagine knowing that if you get the answer wrong,
somebody's going to die.
And then the constant threat,
the realization that every time your finger hits that key,
it's not just the people in England who are hearing it.
It's Germans, too,
and they're just trying to find you, and eventually, they will.
Weeks passed, and Noor grew accustomed to exhaustion
as she and her radio were always on the move.
The radio operators
couldn't just put their radio down somewhere in a barn, let's say,
and leave it there.
They had to move it from place to place.
By then, the Gestapo had her description,
forcing her to change her appearance at times to be safe.
She could trust no one.
Once, when poor reception forced her to rig her antenna outside,
she was discovered, with only her charm to protect her.
This seems like quite a struggle for you, mademoiselle.
What have we here? A radio?
Oh! You surprised me, major.
I confess I am running the wire for my radio to listen to jazz on the BBC.
It is forbidden, I know, but I must have my jazz.
You understand, I'm sure.
The music helps us to forget the war, everything. Do you dance?
I must confess, I am a terrible dancer.
Everyone must have their music.
Come, with any luck tonight, Duke Ellington.
Actually being a woman was a great advantage in this regard,
because women were essentially invisible to the Germans
as terrorists or resistance agents or working for the SOE,
as Noor was, until relatively late,
much later that you expect.
It had been 3 months since Noor arrived.
She'd already survived longer than anyone thought she could.
And Paris had only become more dangerous.
The Gestapo knew what she looked like,
and even her code name: Madeleine.
There's evidence to suggest the Gestapo knew about her
and she was followed, but utilizing her training,
she was able to lose the people following her.
Stop!
For all her time in Paris,
Noor had never returned to her childhood home,
but now, exhausted and alone,
she returned to Suresnes, her old neighbourhood,
calling upon a family friend.
It was a desperate and dangerous choice.
Agents were trained not to go anywhere near people
who might know who they really were
because it was felt that that could be very dangerous
and draw attention to them.
But Noor, obviously, was in a situation
where she wasn't sure what to do,
and she trusted these people.
Noor, what are you doing here?
So good to see you,
but we thought you had left the country with your family.
Madam Pinchon, please. I am working for the British.
The British?!
Yes. I need to set up a radio post. You must help me.
Oh my god, Noor! Come in, it is so dangerous.
There are Germans everywhere.
It was a time in which she could never be sure.
She could not be sure what the allegiances might be
of these people that she had known very well.
Noor's new life met her old,
as she strung her radio antennae in a place so close to her family home.
Don't even think of going over there, Noor,
the house is full of Germans now.
What would my father think, to see the house so full of soldiers?
Maybe it was just a way of gaining some kind of inner strength,
to just see the place where her father and her mother had lived,
where she had grown up and known maybe happier times.
Avenue Foch.
As the resistance became more organized
and the Germans were getting more aware
that this was going on,
- they started to offer money for people to denounce people.
Ja, Herr Keiffer.
Yes, the reward is as we advertised, miss.
What is the name?
I think even the Germans were quite surprised
at the number of cases that,
that they were put in touch with people who did prove in the end
to be the kind of people they were looking for.
Is good.
They have sold us another one. Call Cartaud.
Noor was actually betrayed by a woman called Renée Garry,
who was the sister of the man who ran the organization,
the circuit that she belonged to,
that would appear to be a sense of kind of jealousy and resentment.
Noor was very glamorous, an attractive woman.
The informant identified Noor's last secure apartment.
I think it's hard to imagine
that people really thought through the full consequences of what they were doing
or what... they didn't know about the existence of the camps,
but they did know that people could die as a result of it.
And we can't escape that fact.
How kind of you to leave your radio and codes for us.
Place your hands behind your head. I intend to search you.
Argh!
Get back or I'll shoot!
As soon as she was captured,
that code book fell into German hands,
and they were able to see the messages that she had sent.
But crucially, it also meant
that they could start communicating with London,
pretending to be her.
On October 13, 1943,
after working in Paris as an SOE agent for 4 months,
Noor Inayat Khan was arrested.
What happened to you, Cartaud?
Take her to room number 3.
Shall I call you by your code name, Madeleine?
And I see that in your letters to your mother,
you sign them, Babuly?
Very sentimental.
How can you know that?
Oh, we know your mother's name, where she lives.
We know your officer in chief in London is named Buckmaster.
We know you trained at Beaulieu Manor.
We know a great deal about you, Madeleine.
Do you have an agent in London?
Perhaps we do.
Why don't you give us your real name for a start?
Write it down for us.
And perhaps a contact here in Paris.
Someone unimportant.
There is nothing I can tell you.
There is no need to suffer, Madeleine.
Suttill was very cooperative.
He found an honourable way to talk to us.
You can, too.
No one will be injured in any way. I promise.
I have nothing to say to you.
You represent everything I despise.
Don't be so harsh on us, Madeleine.
We are only soldiers. We are no different from you.
You are nothing like me.
Noor was a tiny little petite woman,
but seemed to have the emotional strength of a tiger.
It's very hard for me to imagine what Noor was...
Must have been going through when she was arrested finally,
and now in the presence of interrogators
of the German terror apparatus organizations.
They threatened her, cajoled her,
promised her special treatment.
They did everything they could, but she refused to give in.
It was her deep commitment to certain core spiritual values
that were unshakable that led her to resist
all temptations and threats
and to adhere passionately to what she believed to be true.
Take her out.
The interrogation went on for days,
but they couldn't break her. Noor could think only of escape.
She wasn't going to collaborate with the Germans.
She refused to give any information.
She refused to talk to them.
In her cell, Noor wrote secret notes to two other prisoners,
suggesting a break-out.
They used the private lavatory as a drop point for the notes
and hatched a plan.
Her fellow prisoner, John Starr, stole a screwdriver,
hiding it each morning for the others to find.
Noor worked for 3 weeks,
trading off the tool, using its sharp edge
to dig the iron rungs away from the window's concrete frame.
The fact that Noor repeatedly tried to escape,
both on her own and in collaboration with other captured resisters
at Avenue Foch is pretty unprecedented and unique.
They managed to remove the rungs on the window by the use of a screwdriver,
trying to escape
Noor was the last to loosen her bars,
but her fellow prisoners were able to remove the heavy skylight
and help her up onto the roof.
They were finally free.
But as they fled into the night,
an air raid siren blared,
alerting the guards to their escape.
They were thwarted by an RAF raid.
As soon as a raid, an air raid happened,
then the prison staff would check on the cells,
and then it was... the alarm was raised.
After less than an hour of freedom,
the 3 prisoners were once again led into Gestapo headquarters.
This, I think, is evidence of the kind of person that Noor was.
We know that she was shy. We know that she was reticent.
We know that she was small.
And yet clearly, she had this ferocious streak and desire to escape.
Berlin?
This was the last straw for Keiffer.
In a letter sent to Nazi headquarters in Berlin,
Keiffer designates Noor "Nacht und Nebel,"
night and fog.
One of the classification that the Germans, the Nazis,
gave to their prisoners
was something called Nacht und Nebel,
and it comes from a saying,
"sie sollte nacht und nebel verschwinden,"
"she should disappear into night and fog."
So this was an identifier for agents
who were seen as the most dangerous,
that they would disappear into the concentration camp system
and never be released.
Noor was helpless, her fate sealed,
and tragically, in German hands,
her radio continued to broadcast under her codename, Madeleine.
Back in England, Buckmaster and Marks were unaware of Noor's capture,
until it was too late.
The bluff check for Noor Khan is wrong, sir.
There are 18 letters.
How did this happen? Why wasn't I notified?
I gave very specific instructions about her.
Do you understand what this means?
Means the Germans have been using her radio and codes, Marks,
and making fools of us all.
It means they have her. She's gone, poor girl
She had held up against 3 weeks of unsuccessful interrogation in Paris.
Then, finally, on November 26,
1943, Noor was sent by train to Pforzheim prison in Germany.
For her journey and her time in prison,
Noor was ordered to be kept always in chains,
always isolated from her fellow prisoners.
I'm not aware of any other agent who was treated in that way.
They clearly were concerned that she would try to escape again.
There does seem to be this determination not to give in.
Finally, after almost a year in captivity,
Noor was taken to Dachau, the concentration camp
where thousands of Jews, political prisoners,
and others considered an enemy of the Reich were killed.
So she, of course, feared death.
Every human being fears death,
and no doubt she feared, more than death,
the horrors of the brutality of the Gestapo.
She came face to face with the very worst of reality,
the worst of the world in which we live.
How did she... how did she survive?
How did she make her way through?
I don't know that anyone can quite answer that question.
It... it speaks of a level of faith, of resilience,
of trust in the divine beneficence,
in an assurance that in the end,
when all of this horror is exhausted,
the sun will dawn.
That must have been her faith,
only that faith could have carried her through.
Do come back, little daughter,
the birds sang, the whole world is so sad without you.
The tall trees have lost all their leaves,
so hard have they wept.
The birds sing no more.
Even the great sun is so sad
that if you don't return, little daughter,
he may never come again.
Her message was that the human soul is of the divine source,
that every human being is sacrosanct;
that all people must be free
and that if it requires the sacrifice of one's own life,
then that commonwealth of humanity deserves such a sacrifice.
This program was made possible in part
by the El-Hibri foundation,
embracing faith in humanity.
And the following institutions and individuals.
"Enemy of the Reich" is available on DVD.
To order, visit Shoppbs.Org.
Or call 1-800-play-pbs.