Leo Marks, a brilliant young cryptographer who got to know Noor well during her last weeks in England, was also worried. The system which agents used at that time to receive and transmit messages was code-based around a well-known poem they had memorized which always concerned him as it could be so easily deciphered. Many agents chose well-known poems which the enemy could guess. It was for that reason that in December 1943 he gave a poem called ‘The Life that I Have’, which he had written himself in memory of his girlfriend Ruth, who had just been killed, to another SOE agent Violette Szabo and which nobody else knew. Nonetheless, if caught and forced to transmit under duress, an agent had, as additional security, both a ‘bluff’ check to precede the message which was a warning even if it was then followed by a ‘true’ check, which it was supposed only London could know about. But for Noor, using such a false check would, of course, involve lying to her captors since it was intended to deceive, and when Leo discussed this with Noor she replied, shocked, ‘Lie about them. Why should I do that?’ Lying went against her religion. Noor insisted that rather than lie she would just refuse to tell them anything no matter how often they asked.
Marks, clearly smitten with the beautiful Noor, was worried that in practice this would mean her enduring unimaginable torture. In an attempt to protect her he gave her a new security check, telling her ‘you won’t have to lie about it because no one but you and me will know that it exists’. When she went off to practise encoding the messages for him with the new check, ‘I prayed … that she’d repeat all her old mistakes and that I could write a bad report on her to prevent her from going in.’ But she did it perfectly, so Marks wrote Buckmaster the positive report he needed for Noor to be given clearance to fly off at the next full moon. On 16 June, Vera Atkins drove down to Sussex with Noor. At the last minute, just before she flew off, Vera gave her a silver brooch, suddenly removing it from her own suit and pinning it on to her lapel with the words: ‘It’s a little bird. It will bring you luck.’ From now on Noor was Jeanne-Marie Renier, a children’s nurse, with a complicated cover story worked out by Atkins herself.
The summer that Noor and Vera Leigh were sent back to Paris, reprisals and arrests were an everyday occurrence as denunciations from collaborators and infiltrators were flooding into Gestapo offices. One of those suspected by the Allies of being an informant for the SS with a specific brief to foil the activities of SOE was Violette Morris, the bisexual former athlete highly visible thanks to her enormous size, her habit of dressing as a man and the freedom with which she drove her black Citro?n car from Paris to Cannes or Nice in the south of France, chauffeuring members of the Gestapo or Vichy officials. She still lived on her houseboat on the Seine, ‘where she frequently receives German officers’, and although she had handed over the car-parts garage she owned in Paris to the Luftwaffe in 1941 she continued to run it for the Germans, which entitled her to an apparently never ending supply of fuel and other black-market goods. Many of those she drove knew her as ‘la fameuse Violette Morris’, the former racing driver of the 1920s. She was implicated in a number of arrests in 1943 and prisoners taken to Fresnes shuddered at the mention of her name.