‘I was a bit of a runaround at first, until I got to know how things worked. One of my first jobs was to ensure that special coded messages which were broadcast every evening by the BBC at Bush House were in the right place at the right time. That meant taking them down to the “Basement”, as it was known somewhat sinisterly, which was run by a sergeant who was a veteran of the First World War. He wasn’t a particularly happy person and he seemed to have a cigarette permanently glued to his top lip, but we seemed to get on after a while.
‘Probably my most important job at that time was to get all the messages from all the various sections to him by 5pm, so that they could be sent over to the BBC – it was crucial that the messages went out so that the Resistance units could get their instructions.’
Noreen was working alongside living legends of the secret world such as Leo Marks, a cryptographer in charge of agent codes, and Forest Yeo-Thomas, codename the White Rabbit, one of the organisation’s most celebrated agents. The two men were great friends, according to Noreen.
‘Leo Marks’s office was on the ground floor and mine was on the first floor but I saw a lot of him. He was a very nice chap, but his popularity was further increased because his mother was always sending him cakes, biscuits and freshly made sandwiches, which, because he was so nice, he always shared with other people so there was always a bit of a party taking place in his room.
‘After a few months I was given better and more interesting jobs, and one of the most interesting was to attend agent debriefing sessions. There was a fairly straightforward routine when an agent came in. First of all they were given a huge cooked breakfast at the airport, after which they were taken to a place called Orchard Court, in Portman Square, close to the SOE headquarters. It could sometimes take months to get an agent back from the field for a debriefing session because of the complexities of living in occupied France. It was about at that stage that I really began to understand the sort of pressures the agents were under.
‘It was always fascinating to see them just hours after they had left France. Some would be shaking and chain smoking, and others who had witnessed or suffered much worse experiences were as cool as cucumbers. I think it was awfully easy for a lot of people in England to say at the time, “I’d never talk if I was captured.” But when you are actually over there none of us could tell what our reactions would be, and I suppose a time would come when the human spirit can no longer take any more punishment.
‘The debriefing sessions were very relaxed, the agents were never rushed or pushed too hard, but the interviews were very detailed and could last several hours because the agents had so much information.
‘A wireless operator for example was under enormous pressure, because he would have only about 15 minutes to send his message, which had to contain a lot of information about sabotage or enemy movements, but other information couldn’t be included because it wasn’t as crucial as operations.
‘The idea of the debriefing sessions was to get into the real detail, such as the need to have a permit to put a bike on a train, or indeed the need for more bikes. The information was often the sort of detail a radio operator wouldn’t be able to send because the need wasn’t urgent. Every little bit of information helped in the preparation and briefing of agents who were just about to deploy on an operation. All of the agents had to be 100 per cent convincing all of the time, and it might be very small, almost insignificant details such as only being able to have coffee twice a week – that little bit of detail could be really important for a new agent going into an occupied country. Just imagine a new agent being lifted by the police and being asked a simple question like “How many cups of coffee do you drink a week?” The wrong answer could be a death sentence.’
By the middle of 1943 Noreen was a fully-fledged member of the SOE. She would begin work every morning, dressed in civilian clothes, at around 8am and work through until 6pm or later, depending on whether there was some sort of emergency. It became second nature never to talk about her work, and even her own mother was convinced Noreen was a secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. With her almost perfect French, Noreen worked exclusively in F Section, the department which looked after agents in France. SOE now occupied several buildings in central London, all close to the headquarters in Baker Street. Working in the headquarters were citizens of every country occupied by the Axis powers – but there was, according to Noreen, an unwritten rule, which was that there could be absolutely no contact between people from the different sections for security reasons.
‘We were all very aware that the agents’ security, their lives in fact, depended on secrecy. One word, one slip of the tongue could result in a disaster. I loved the job, the people were fascinating and there was a real sense of purpose to the work.’
Then, in February 1944, Noreen was asked to go and work at what was known as the secret agents’ finishing school at Beaulieu, the country seat of the Barons Montagu of Beaulieu.
By the time Noreen joined the SOE, the secret organisation has grown into a vast network of more than 60 training schools located across Britain, where at any one time hundreds of students were under training. There were also schools in Canada, for the training of US and Canadian agents, as well as in Palestine, at the Ramat David air base in Haifa, and in Singapore.
The training programme began at the ‘Preliminary Schools’, such as the Special Training School 5 (STS5) at Warnborough Manor, near Guildford in Surrey. The courses generally lasted two to three weeks, and it was here that they assessed the recruit’s character and suitability for clandestine operations, without actually revealing what SOE did. (Interestingly, this same technique was adopted by 14 Intelligence Company during the initial selection when recruiting operatives for ‘special duties’ in Northern Ireland.)
Those potential SOE agents who passed were sent to one of several paramilitary schools, based at, amongst other establishments, the ten shooting lodges of Arisaig House (STS21), a forbidding granite country residence in Inverness-shire, which was requisitioned by the Army in 1941 and where Odette Churchill, one of the heroines of the SOE, was trained.
The locations were chosen for their remoteness and the gruelling terrain. Physical training was one of the key elements of the training, including many marches over the rugged Scottish countryside. For reasons of security, nationalities were kept separate, but virtually all students followed the same courses. Days were long and sleep was often in short supply, as the instructors piled on the pressure and assessed the recruits’ ability to make decisions and think clearly under extreme duress.
The courses lasted for five weeks and included lessons in physical training, silent killing, weapons handling, demolition, field craft, navigation and signals. Weapons training was based on close-quarters combat, with two ex-Shanghai officers, William Fairbairn and Eric Anthony Sykes, teaching unarmed combat and silent killing. The two men gave their name to the FS fighting knife – a small knife used mainly by the Commandos – and the Fairbairn Fighting System, which was also taught to members of the CIA and FBI. The students learnt to master the Colt .45 and .38 and the Sten gun, a weapon regarded by many as being of dubious reliability. The recruits were taught the ‘double tap’ system of killing, firing two shots at a target, ideally the head, to ensure certain death.
Instructors also made use of the local train network, and trainees were given missions to ‘sabotage’ the West Highland Line using dummy explosives. Later in their training, the student agents also had to undertake a number of parachute jumps, six for men and five for women, at Ringway airport near Manchester.
Once these stages of training had been successfully mastered, agents moved to Beaulieu in Hampshire, the location of the Group B training school – ‘the final stop before they drop’, as some wag once observed.
Beaulieu was the perfect training school. It was located within the seclusion of the New Forest and the estate had numerous houses and outbuildings where students could perfect and hone their skills in relative secrecy. The training staff were housed in a central headquarters while the trainees were accommodated in a variety of different houses