Why Women Often Make the Best Spies

JAMES Bond, George Smiley and Jason Bourne are all famous fictional spies – and all men. But real-life women agents played a vital role against Britain’s enemies in World War II and its aftermath. These often very ordinary seeming women inspired the creation of my heroine in White Raven.

Slipping under the radar

At a time when women were not taken seriously in private and public life, female secret agents used this social camouflage to slip under the radar.

Rather than the dangerously glamorous femme fatales of the movies, they used their wits rather than their looks to gather information from under the noses of the men who never dreamt that these respectable women could be stealing their secrets and relaying them back to their enemies.

Outwitting the Gestapo

Take Hilda Campbell, a middle-aged Scottish housewife who outwitted the Gestapo. The Aberdeen University modern languages student met her husband on a trip to Hamburg in 1911. The year after her husband died suddenly in 1938, she returned to the UK to visit her parents.

The Gestapo, having discovered her dual nationality, blackmailed Campbell into spying for them by threatening her son, but as soon as she arrived in Aberdeen, she went to the police and was recruited as a double agent for the British Intelligence Services. On her return to Germany, the Gestapo were so impressed by her – false – information that she was awarded the Eagle medal. After saving countless lives, Campbell had to fake her own death to escape home to Britain, where she passed on vital information that helped break up a huge spy ring in the US.

First female wireless operator sent to occupied France

Noor Inayat Khan was another improbable secret agent. Born the royal daughter of an Indian pacifist, she trained as a radio operator with the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and was recruited by the Special Operations Executive in 1943.

Under the code name Madeline, she became the first female wireless operator sent to occupied France to aid the French Resistance. Khan carried a 30-pound suitcase radio and single-handedly maintained communications between London and occupied Paris, helping 30 Allied airmen escape.

Tragically, she was betrayed, captured and executed at Dachau concentration camp. Posthumously in 1949, Khan became the first woman of south Asian descent to be awarded the George Cross, the highest civilian decoration in the UK.

Exposed at 87

Female secret agents weren’t always on our side. Melita Norwood, who the press dubbed “the spy who came in from the Co-op” when she was finally exposed at the age of 87 for her role as the last of the atomic spies, betrayed Britain’s secrets to help the Soviet Union catch up in the nuclear arms race.

Norwood, who worked in a mundane job as a secretary for the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association for 40 years, was one of a ring of communist spies working in America and Britain who passed on information about the British atomic weapons project Tube Alloys.

Known as Agent Hola, whose story inspired the film Red Joan, Norwood was one of the Kremlin’s most prized deep-cover agents during the Cold War. She wasn’t exposed until 1999.

“I did not want money. It was not that side I was interested in. I wanted Russia to be on equal footing with the west,” said Norwood, by then a great-grandmother and widow.

Like Norwood, my heroine Rosie Anderson is drawn into espionage by her horror at the threat of global nuclear annihilation, and like Norwood, she is living an ordinary life – in her case as an artist and teacher in a girls’ school – when she is recruited.

Carrying on the 007 story

At this year’s Wigtown Book Festival, I’ll be talking about the resourceful and brave women spies who inspired White Raven. Also appearing is Daria Santini who will be talking about her book, A Woman Named Edith, a biography of Edith Tudor Hart, the Soviet spy who recruited Kim Philby but who was never caught. Spies feature in another event – the Ian Fleming Estate has chosen a female writer, Kim Sherwood, to breathe new life into James Bond and she will talk about carrying on the 007 story.