Read an extract of The Last Secret Agent by Pippa Latour with Jude Dobson.
This is an extract for The Last Secret Agent, the memoir of Pippa Latour, one of the last female operations agents in France to get out alive in WWII.
My name is Phyllis Ada Latour, known to many in my later years as Pippa, and I am 102 years old. I am also known by other names — code names and alias names — because I was a World War II secret operative agent. This is my memoir, which finally tells the story of my life working behind enemy lines in France 80 years ago. It is a part of my life that, until now, I have intentionally never revealed to anybody. Not my husband (when I had one), nor my children — even when they became adults.
It would likely have stayed that way, which would have suited me perfectly, if it were not for my elder son finding something about me on the internet, some twenty years ago. Without the advent of the internet — something I could not have foreseen
when I made the decision never to talk about these things in 1945 — my wish for secrecy would likely have remained intact. Because, as I see it, it wasn’t anybody’s business what I did in the war. It was my business. Mine alone.
My son was prompted to discuss the discovery with his younger brother, concerned that their mother might be in some sort of trouble and that was why I had never mentioned it to them. He flew to New Zealand (where I live, as does his younger brother) to meet up with him. Together they decided to talk to me, and the two obvious questions were posed. Was this World War II operative, Phyllis Latour, their mother of the same name? And presuming that it was (as they had), why had I never mentioned this to them?
I could not lie to my sons once they asked me directly. Up until then, I had simply chosen not to tell them everything about my war. Instead I had told them what I thought they needed to know. I was a balloon operator for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in the Royal Air Force (RAF), and that was not incorrect: I did that job for three years. I am pretty sure I told them about my time in the Royal Navy records department before that. I just didn’t tell them what came in the later stages of the war with the Special Operations Executive (SOE). And my former husband? I chose never to tell him because I saw how loose he was with quite sensitive information told to him by others. I thought if he was like that with their information, my information was never going to be kept secret by him.
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Before I start telling you about my life, you’ll need some background on what SOE is. In June 1940, the Special Operations Executive was established by England’s wartime prime minister Winston Churchill to wage a secret war using an underground army of sorts in enemy-occupied Europe and Asia. Its purpose was to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe (and, later, also in occupied Southeast Asia), as well as aiding local Resistance movements. Deliberately clandestine, the existence of SOE was not widely known even though some 13,000 people were involved. About 3,200 of these people were women. I was one of the women, and my job was to be a wireless operator in northern France, which I did in 1944.
Churchill instructed those, like me, tasked with the work across the English Channel to go forth and ‘set Europe ablaze’. Sabotage and subversion behind enemy lines, and passing intelligence to Mother England, required courage, resilience and resourcefulness from those of us who agreed to these dangerous jobs. By working with local Resistance forces, our presence on the ground boosted their morale. They were, rightly, wondering when and how this dreadful war would ever end.
In France, with new identities and forged papers, we SOE agents covered hundreds of kilometres on foot, by bike, or on trains, all the time under the constant threat of arrest by the Gestapo should our identity be blown or the work we were undertaking be discovered. It was exhausting work, with the ongoing threat of possibly being betrayed by double agents and traitors. It was hard to trust anyone.
It was also not glamorous; don’t think of me or my fellow agents as 007 types. Our job was to disappear — to fit in and not be noticed. Taking the job certainly didn’t win you any friends in high places either; quite the opposite, in fact. There was plenty of tension between SOE and England’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, now known as MI6), which the Foreign Office had to deal with. The SIS viewed SOE with some suspicion. I did not know it at the time, but Sir Stewart Menzies, head of the SIS, argued on many an occasion that SOE agents were ‘amateur, dangerous, and bogus’, saying that we would disrupt their own intelligence gathering operations by blowing up bridges and factories. The SIS preferred to work quietly through influential channels and individuals, whereas SOE’s way of operating was more grassroots. We also often backed anti-establishment organisations, such as the communists; I could only ever really trust communists in France. I also learnt after the war that Bomber Command and SOE did not always see eye to eye.
Although all these vested interests brought massive internal political pressure to bear on the fledgling organisation, SOE had Churchill as its ally; ‘Churchill’s Secret Army’ not only survived, but thrived, throughout World War II. There was also resistance to our existence across in France. General de Gaulle was never keen to recognise our significance, and we definitely felt that on the ground there. Looking back, it was a strange and solitary existence I found myself in in 1944. I could only ever rely on myself — from the top echelons of the British establishment to the people on the ground with me in France, and everyone in between, I trusted very few people. That became ingrained in me in my early twenties as a survival instinct.
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Fast-forward 60 years to me in my eighties in New Zealand, where I have lived quietly for many years, keeping my head down about all that stuff. The discovery of this period of my life was a revelation to my sons and I have to say it caused some discord. If I am honest, I think there was some resentment that their mother had actively chosen not to take them into her confidence. When confronted about that decision, I was at pains to explain that as much as I personally didn’t want to talk about it, there was also something bigger behind this. I had signed an oath not to disclose anything about my war service with SOE. That pledge was something I knew I must honour, and that meant not telling a living soul — not even my family. I was subject to the rules of the Official Secrets Act, and that was not something I wanted to test. The stories were known only to me and the handful of trusted people I shared that hellish existence with. I had never wanted to revisit them. I had buried them. The flashbacks that had caused me to wake up in a sweat had by then become few and far between.
After the war, I simply disappeared. Given that I’d excelled at not being noticed as a spy in wartime, it was not so difficult to fade into an anonymous post-war existence. Besides which, the whole thing had been utterly exhausting, both mentally and physically, and I was completely fed up with double agents and collaborators and trying to figure out who I could trust. I had been fighting my own war within a war — there I was in France, and I couldn’t even trust the French unless they were communists. If I say that to people now, they don’t really get it, but it was the truth.
After the war ended, I was ready to move on with my life and vowed I would never step foot back in France after I left there in October 1944. And I never have. I have been asked more than once if I would go back, and the answer has always been a resolute no.
While I was silent about my experience, it seems that others were not. I heard about people wanting medals for this and that, things they did in the war; people saying things that were not right; people writing things that were not right. I would simply think ‘Poppycock — there’s more poppycock coming out!’ If people are going to write things, they must tell the truth — and the truth is not pretty; it’s not good.
This book tells the truth about my war. I’m the last living female special operative from F Section, and I need to record what happened before I die. I would like to leave my story behind so that, perhaps, young women in particular might know what it was like for me back then.
The Last Secret Agent
by Pippa Latour with Jude Dobson
The extraordinary untold story of Pippa Latour, who parachuted into occupied France in 1944 as an undercover agent.
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