The Last Secret Agent by Pippa Latour: The young female British spy who makes Bond look
The Last Secret Agent by Pippa Latour with Jude Dobson (Monoray £22, 288pp)
In May 1944 a 23-year-old British girl called Pippa Latour parachuted into occupied Normandy with nothing more than a sten gun, a compass, a natty mustard suit that was supposed to make her look French and a lethal pill to swallow in the event that she was caught by the Germans.
Her job was to send coded messages back to London about Nazi troop movements during these desperate final months of the war.
This made her a spy, which meant that, in the event of capture, the Germans would ignore the Geneva Convention. She would be tortured, almost certainly raped, and murdered.
The average life expectancy of a man in her position was just six weeks. Women were better at lasting a little while longer but even so, Pippa’s bosses put her chances of coming home at 50/50.
At the outset of this compulsively readable book, Pippa is characteristically clear-sighted about the nature of her work for the Special Operations Executive.
‘I was not a James Bond-style spy. I was a secret agent whose job it was to blend into the background and cause quiet chaos.’
She did this by posing as a French teenager (she was petite and could pass at a pinch for 14) who cycled around the Normandy countryside selling goats’ milk soap to German soldiers who were sick of their gritty army-issued toiletries.
In fact, what Pippa was actually doing as she chatted to her customers was picking up intelligence about troop movements.
Then, using one of 17 radio sets hidden in ditches, hedges or bombed-out buildings around the countryside, she would transmit the information back to her handlers in London.
Within hours, a deadly attack by the Allies from the skies would surgically remove the German soldiers to whom the pretty ‘French schoolgirl’ had recently been selling soap.
While Pippa’s language skills were perfect, thanks to a French father and a stint in a Parisian finishing school, she had been issued extra instructions about how to make sure she never gave herself away.
Better than Bond: Pippa Latour was only 23 when she was sent behind enemy lines
Effects of War: Pippa after returning from France
This included never taking off her beret indoors, looking left when she crossed the road, or putting the milk in before the tea.
Her handlers had even insisted when she parachuted into France that her freshly shampooed hair should be made to look dirty – being well-groomed would distinguish her from the locals, who had neither the time nor the energy to worry about their appearance.
Within days of arriving, though, there was no need for these extra precautions. Often sleeping rough in the Normandy forest for fear of drawing attention to ‘safe houses’ run by the French Resistance, Pippa got used to washing in muddy streams and eating roasted rat, with the result that she quickly acquired the exhausted and emaciated look of a long-time resident.
By the time she left France four months later, following D-Day, she weighed just 5st 4lb.
Even so, there were some terrifyingly close calls. Once, when Pippa was tapping out a message on a radio hidden in a local farmhouse, two German soldiers opened the door looking for food.
Cool as a cucumber, she closed the wireless set, pretending that it was a case she was packing and told the men that she had scarlet fever and needed to get out of the village. The soldiers sensibly scarpered.
On another even more dangerous occasion, she was strip-searched by the SS, who forgot to check the shoelace that she used to tie up her ponytail. Little did they know that inside she had hidden a thin piece of silk, on which she had recorded the codes that she used whenever she contacted her handlers in London.
June 1944: German soldier in front of a sign encouraging the French to repel the Allies
Other threats were more random. Once, she tells us in crisp, unsentimental prose, two German soldiers raped her, believing that she was indeed a French schoolgirl who deserved no better.
Almost as traumatic was the fact that the attack was interrupted by a German officer who promptly shot the two perpetrators dead. Since that terrible event, Pippa tells us, ‘I have never allowed anyone to kiss me on the lips.’
What sort of girl would be tough enough to volunteer for such a job, let alone see it through without giving herself away? The clue, inevitably, lies in Pippa’s early years. Born in South Africa to a British mother and French doctor father, she was an orphan by the age of four.
Consequently, she was bounced around her extended family in both France and England, which gave her the kind of cosmopolitan air that allowed her to fit in anywhere.
Perhaps Pippa’s greatest asset as a spy, though, was that, having lost such important family members early on, she had developed a steely inner core. Or, to put it in her own words, ‘I trusted very few people.’
It is that self-containment which explains why Pippa Latour was 80 years old before she agreed to talk about her wartime past. Even then, she was still clearly annoyed about being ‘outed’ by her adult sons, who came across a mention of her name on a website dealing with ‘Churchill’s Secret Service’, as the Special Operations Executive (SOE) was known, and demanded to know more.
‘Without the advent of the internet, my wish for secrecy would likely have remained intact,’ she tells us crossly. ‘Because, as I see it, it wasn’t anybody’s business what I did in the war.’
Family: Pippa with her children (from left) Odette, Pauline, Brendon and Barry
Thank heavens, though, that Pippa Latour did agree to talk (naturally, she checked first that the Official Secrets Act no longer applied to her).
For the result is this brilliant book that is not only a testimony to her personal heroism but also acts as a collective memorial for all the other female SOEs, many of them her colleagues, who were tortured and murdered by the Nazis.
When Pippa died last year at the age of 102, the final living link with an extraordinary episode in women’s history went with her. We have a duty never to forget.