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SPY PRINCESS
THE LIFE OF NOOR INAYAT KHAN
INTRODUCTION
1. This is the remarkable biography of Noor Inayat Khan, code named
"Madeleine". The first woman wireless transmitter in occupied France during
WW-II, she was trained by Britain's SOE (The Special Operations Executive)
and assumed the most dangerous resistance post in underground Paris.
Betrayed into the hands of the Gestapo, Noor resisted intensive interrogation,
severe deprivation and torture with courage and silence, revealing nothing to
her captors, not even her own name. She was executed at Dachau in 1944.
Details about the book are as under:
a. Author Sharabani Basu
b. Pages 230
c. Published February 8, 2006
d. ISBN13 9780750939652
SYNOPSIS
2. "Spy Princess" explains Noor's
inspiring life from birth to death,
incorporating information from her family,
friends, witnesses, and official records including recently released personal
files of SOE operatives. It is the story of a young woman who lived with grace,
beauty, courage and determination, and who bravely offered the ultimate
sacrifice of her own life in service of her ideals. Her last word was "Liberate".
3. Once you’ve seen it, you cannot forget the crematorium at Dachau, the
concentration camp where thousands of people were slaughtered by the
Nazis during World War II. I saw it five decades after the war had ended. Time
had done nothing to obliterate the horror of a place where everything from the
cramped quarters to the furnaces had been designed to inflict suffering and
death on people with an inhuman efficiency.

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4. At that time, the legend of Noor Inayat Khan had been forgotten; the
Indians who visited Dachau usually missed the plaque to her memory: “A la
memoire de Noor Inayat Khan, 1914-1944; Madeleine dans La Resistance,
Fusil lee a Dachau; Opera trice Radio du Roseau Buck master, Croix de
Guerre 1939-1945, George Cross.” After Shrabani Basu’s well-researched
Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan (Lotus/ Roli Books), I suspect
most Indian visitors to Dachau will pause to honour the shy, dreamy girl
whose extraordinary life ended in this terrible place.
5. Over the years her story has been told by authors who lacked the facts,
or who saw in Noor a wonderfully exotic figure, an Indian princess turned Mata
Hari. Laurent Joffin wrote a trashy romance, The Forgotten Princess, in which
Noor appeared as a smouldering, sensuous and not terribly bright spy.
6. One of the few books that set down the truth about Noor was written by
a friend and associate, Jean Overton Fuller, though even Fuller was
hampered by a lack of information. Last year, Shauna Singh Baldwin
fictionalized Noor Inayat Khan’s life in The Tiger Claw. Her account was not
inaccurate, but anyone who reads Baldwin’s book and then turns to Basu’s
non-fiction account will realize that Noor’s life didn’t need fictional
embellishment. The most satisfying parts of Baldwin’s novel were the ones
that drew on real life Noor’s training as a wireless operator, the dangers of
trying to evade discovery by the Germans, her capture just a few weeks
before she was due to return to Britain, the cruel end in Dachau.
7. Basu’s book is far more interesting than The Tiger Claw. In order to tell
the whole story of Noor Inayat Khan’s life, Basu waited until 2003, when the
archive that held the personal files of SOE agents was finally opened. She
went to the Sufi Headquarters in The Hague and to Dachau, visited Inayat
Khan’s tomb in Delhi and spoke to members of the Special Forces Club. Her
research is extensive, and makes up for the slightly bland style.
8. Noor Inayat Khan was born on New Year’s Day in Moscow in 1914, to
the musician and Sufi preacher Hazrat Inayat Khan and his American wife,
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Ora Ray Baker. Hazrat Inayat Khan was descended from Tipu Sultan’s family
and had performed at concerts of Indian music in America, Paris and Moscow.
Noor grew up in London and in the small village of Tremblaye, outside Paris.
She was a creative child who loved listening to her father’s lectures on Sufism,
wrote sentimental poems and played the harp and the piano. As a young
adult, she studied child psychology, translated the Jataka Tales into English
and contributed stories to the children’s page of the Sunday Figaro. She was
quite beautiful; petite, doe-eyed, with small, near-perfect features: little about
her suggested a future spy.
9. In 1940, she and her brother Vilayat decided to go to England and join
the war effort. Noor joined the SOE as a wireless operator: it was a humble
job, but a dangerous one, and some of her trainers feared that she was not
bright enough, or that she would crack under pressure. Selwyn Jepson, who
recruited her, didn’t share their fears—he felt instinctively that she was right
for the job.
10. Noor was sent into France in June 1943, working as a radio operator
under the code name “Madeleine”. Prosper, the group she joined, had been
under surveillance by the Germans for a while, though, and her colleagues
were arrested within a few days of her arrival in Paris: most of them were
executed or died in concentration camps. Noor became the last radio operator
in France; for several months, she managed to make her transmissions while
dodging the Germans. In October, her luck ran out: she was captured and
imprisoned. During the next few months, she was interrogated several times;
she was shackled and had either potato peel or cabbage soup to eat, but she
didn’t crack. She was transferred to Dachau in September 1944. On the night
of 12th September, Noor was brutally beaten and tortured before she and
three other women were shot and sent to the crematorium. Seven months
later, Dachau was liberated.
11. In England Noor Inayat Khan joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force
(WAAF) and trained as a wireless operator. While working at a Royal Air
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Force bomber station, her ability to speak French fluently brought her to the
attention of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). After being interviewed
at the War Office she agreed to become a British special agent.
12. Given the codename "Madeleine" she was flown to Le Mans with Diana
Rowden and Cecily Lefort on 16th June 1943. She travelled to Paris where
she joined the Prosper Network led by Francis Suttill. Soon after arriving a
large number of members of the resistance group associated with Prosper
were arrested by the Gestapo. Fearing that the group had been infiltrated by
a German spy, she was instructed to return home. However, she declined,
arguing that she was the only wireless operator left in the group.
13. Noor continued to keep the Special Operations Executive in London
informed by wireless what was going on in France. She also made attempts
to rebuild the Prosper Network. However, it appears that the Gestapo already
knew of her existence and were following her in an attempt to capture other
members of the French Resistance.
14. After three and a half months in France Noor was arrested in October
and taken to Gestapo Headquarters. She was interrogated and although she
remained silent they discovered a book in her possession where she had
recorded the messages she had been sending and receiving. The Gestapo
were able to break her code and were able to send false information to the
SOE in London and enabled them to capture three more secret agents landed
in France.
15. Noor was taken to Nazi Germany where she was imprisoned at
Karlsruhe. In the summer of 1944, Noor, and three other SOE agents,
Yolande Beekman, Eliane Plewman and Madeleine Damerment, were moved
to Dachau Concentration Camp. The four women were murdered by the
Schutz Staffeinel (SS) on 12th September, 1944. In 1949 Noor Inayat Khan
was posthumously awarded the George Cross.

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ABOUT AUTHOR
16. Shrabani was born in Calcutta and grew up in Dhaka, Kathmandu and
Delhi. She graduated in History from St Stephen’s College, Delhi and
completed her Masters from Delhi University. In 1983 she began her career
as a trainee journalist in the bustling offices of The Times of India in Bombay.
She moved to London in 1987, and has since then been the correspondent
of the Calcutta-based newspaper Ananda Bazar Patrika and The Telegraph.
Over her long career she has done exclusive interviews with many eminent
people including Benazir Bhutto, Sheikh Hasina, Salman Rushdie, Nirad C
Chaudhuri and Viv Richards.
17. She has always combined her journalism with her love of history and all
her books have evolved from her observations about the shared histories of
India and Britain. Shrabani has been interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s flagship
Woman’s Hour programme and appeared on BBC Television’s Saturday
Kitchen and The One Show. She is soon to appear with celebrity chef Heston
Blumental in his series Great British Food. She has been invited to speak at
several literary festivals including the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Bath
Literature Festival, Words by the Water, Keswick, Cambridge History Festival,
Jaipur Literature Festival, Indian Summer in Chicago, Seattle and Vancouver
and the Lahore Literary Festival.
18. In 2010, Shrabani set up the Noor Inayat Khan Memorial Trust to ensure
that Noor’s story and sacrifice were preserved for the next generation. The
Memorial was unveiled in London’s Gordon Square by Princess Anne in
November 2012. It was followed by the release of a Royal Mail stamp in
honour of Noor in March 2014. Her work to preserve the memory of the World
War-II heroine has been commended in the House of Lords. She lives in
London with her daughters.

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