There is still controversy today about why London continued to send agents as well as money into France when there were concerns that the circuit might have been blown. Some historians believe that Buckmaster was simply careless and overlooked security lapses out of a political need to keep the section’s agents in the field. Others conclude that the British were aware of the ‘radio games’ but played along with the deception so as to distract the Germans in anticipation of D-Day. Yet there is now evidence that Sonia Olschanesky, a Russian-born, locally hired agent working for SOE in France, had warned London on 1 October 1943 of Noor’s capture. Buckmaster ignored the warning, worried about the ‘reliability’ of ‘Sonja’ (sic). ‘Had Sonia’s warning been heeded at that time, Dr Goetz’s “radio game” would have been exposed and probably halted there and then, saving countless SOE lives,’ is the view of one historian. Yet Noreen Riols, who from 1943 onwards worked closely with Buckmaster at F Section HQ in London, is at pains to stress that SOE was constantly making life and death decisions without all the means of instant communication available today. She insists that ‘Buck’, as she called him, ‘was always deeply concerned about his agents and far from careless and uncaring about their fate … what critics fail to understand is that SOE was a fledgling organisation; it was unconventional and improvisational since there were no precedents, no previous experience or strategy to help and guide its leaders, no charts, reports or manuals to instruct those in charge. They were obliged to make up the rules as they struggled along.’ Either way, the lives of innocent girls were being squandered. The SOE’s historian M. R. D. Foot explained later: ‘To the question why people with so little training were sent to do such important work, the only reply is: the work had to be done and there was no one else to send.’ Leo Marks, having felt such sympathy for Noor during her training, had given her an extra security check to use only if caught, so he was desperately worried when she used it that she must be in enemy hands. ‘I said a silent prayer that Noor was having one of her lapses,’ Marks wrote later, ‘but knew I was having one of my own not to accept the truth.’ Buckmaster insisted that London must continue responding to her as if nothing were amiss and that the two-way traffic with her should continue.
But although by early 1947 Vera believed she knew most of what she would ever learn, she was not quite ready to close all her files, especially as she was now starting to receive new evidence about what had really happened to Noor. It was only after the Natzweiler trial that she had seen the name of Sonia Olschanesky for the first time appear in lists of prisoners. But ‘Olschanesky’, she assumed, while obviously one of the women imprisoned at Karlsruhe, was a name she did not know and quite probably therefore an alias for Noor. Changing names was something they all did and, since Noor had been born in Moscow, she might well have chosen this one, Vera argued.* Some of the most reliable information which helped her finally unravel the last months in Noor’s life came from her brother, Vilayat Inayat Khan, who had received eyewitness accounts from two sources – a French girl, Yolande Lagrave, who had met ‘Nora’ when both were prisoners at Pforzheim secure prison, not at Karlsruhe, in September 1944, and a German woman who had worked at the jail. It was from Yolande that Vera learned that Noor had had her hands and feet constantly manacled, apparently on orders from Berlin as she was considered an especially dangerous prisoner, that she was fed starvation rations, that she was beaten from time to time and that she was rarely allowed to talk to anyone or go outside. Slowly Vera was able to piece together, mostly from interviews with other guards awaiting trial, information about Noor’s resilience and dignity in the face of her exceptionally cruel treatment at Pforzheim.
The key breakthrough for Vera came in January 1947 when she was able to interview Hans Kieffer, deputy head of the SiPo-SD in Paris, who had finally been run to ground.* Kieffer, she knew, would have interrogated her girls while they were still in Paris, and it was because of him that they were sent to Karlsruhe, his home town. But only Noor, considered a particular risk because she had tried to escape twice, was punished in a solitary cell at Pforzheim and kept permanently in chains. In spite of her barbaric treatment she had refused to give away any information, behaviour which more than anything exasperated her captors. On 11 September 1944 she was driven from Pforzheim to Karlsruhe, where she met up with Eliane Plewman, Madeleine Damerment and Yolande Beekman. They were all then taken to Dachau, where they were kept in separate cells and shot in the early hours of 13 September, but not (as the official version claimed) together, with the four women holding hands as they were shot in the back of the neck. There are different accounts of precisely how Noor was murdered, but – according to information from various sources which Vera appears to have believed, although it was not recorded in the official files – the night before she died Noor was given ‘the full treatment’. A German officer, repeating what he had heard from camp officials, told Lieutenant Colonel H. J. Wickey, who worked for Canadian intelligence during the war, that ‘Noor was tortured and abused in her cell by the Germans. She was stripped, kicked and finally left lying on the floor battered and bruised. Then in the early hours of the following morning she was shot in her cell.’