In the Bond films Miss Moneypenny, played most recently by Naomie Harris, is the glamorous secretary of British intelligence supremo M, but in real life, some of the most iconic spies ever have been women across the globe
Vera Atkins, the woman said to have inspired the character, was a fearless field agent before working her way up to become a top “spymistress”.
Born in Romania, she once cosied up to the country’s German ambassador to feed vital intelligence back to Britain, helped codebreakers escape Poland and went undercover in Holland.
In 1941 she became a secretary in the secret Special Operations Executive (SOE), created by PM Winston Churchill to “set Europe ablaze”.
Soon Vera was an officer running 39 female agents in occupied France, even priming them to use devices such as rats stuffed with explosives. Ian Fleming said: “In the real world of spies Vera Atkins was the boss.” She died in 2000 aged 92.
Growing up in Britain with a French mother, beautiful Violette Szabo spoke the language fluently.
(Image: PA)
And when her French husband Etienne was killed in action fighting for the Allies in 1942, Violette swapped her job in an aircraft factory to work as a Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent.
In 1944, codenamed Louise, she was parachuted into occupied France, helping the Resistance and identifying targets for Allied bombers.
But that June she was travelling with a Resistance member in a car stuffed with weapons when they
were stopped at a German checkpoint and a gun battle broke out.
As the pair fled, she twisted her ankle but held off the Germans, killing a corporal, until she ran out of ammunition – giving her companion time to escape.
(Image: PA)
She was tortured and taken to Ravensbrück where was she executed, with other female SOE agents, aged just 23.
New Zealand-born ex-nurse Nancy Wake was living in France when war broke out but, after its surrender, stayed to help run an escape line for stranded Allied troops.
Dubbed the The White Mouse, the frustrated Germans put a five-million-franc price on her head.
On one occasion she coolly dressed in stockings, heels and a fur coat while being pursued, jumping from a train into a vineyard to avoid capture at Nazi checkpoints.
Escaping over the Pyrenees to join the SOE in Britain she was parachuted back into France in 1944 where the Sten-gun toting agent helped lead Resistance fighters.
She once strangled an SS sentry with her bare hands and a comrade said she was: “The most feminine woman I know, until the fighting starts. And then she is like five men.”
(Image: PA)
Nancy, who helped inspired Cate Blanchett’s character in the 2001 film Charlotte Gray, won the George Medal, survived the war and died aged 98 in 2011.
After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Russian-born Noor Inayat Khan, an Indian princess and children’s author, left Paris for Britain where she was recruited by the intelligence services.
After training she was sent back to France in 1943 as the SOE’s first female undercover radio operator – codenamed Madeleine. Life expectancy in the role was six weeks.
But over the next few months she organised the escape of 30 Allied airmen and helped keep the French Resistance supplied with arms.
(Image: PA)
She was betrayed and locked up. After two escape attempts she was transferred to Dachau concentration camp where she was shot dead by the Nazis in 1944, aged 30.
She was posthumously awarded the George Cross.
Odette Sansom was a French-born mum-of-three who put her children in convent school while she volunteered for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), being sent into occupied France in 1942.
There, codenamed Lise, she worked as a courier and radio operator, despite often being searched by the Gestapo until she was betrayed and captured in 1943 with fellow agent Peter Churchill. Odette was tortured with a red-hot poker and had her toenails pulled out.
However she avoided execution by convincing interrogators that Peter was actually Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s nephew and she was his innocent wife.
(Image: PA Archive/Press Association Images)
She went on to marry Peter and was awarded the George Cross.
Odette died in 1995 aged 82.
American Virginia Hall was an unlikely spy – she had a wooden leg she called Cuthbert, having had the limb amputated after a pre-war hunting accident.
That didn’t stop her working as an ambulance driver in France before its surrender in 1940, then signing up to work for the Special Operations Executive in Britain.
She returned to Lyon, France, in 1941 and under the cover of being a reporter, smuggled out information, ran a safehouse for Allied airmen and organised supplies for the Resistance.
Despite desperate Gestapo appeals for information about the mysterious “Lady with the Limp,” Virginia escaped in 1942 only to return to France for American intelligence in 1944 – disguised as a peasant woman with grey hair and filed-down teeth.
She died in 1982 at the age of 76.
(Image: Getty Images for EON Productions)
PM Winston Churchill’s “favourite spy” Krystyna Skarbek, has been dubbed “the bravest of the brave”.
Escaping Nazi-occupied Poland, the beautiful 31-year-old countess offered her services to British intelligence, changing her name to Christine Granville.
Skiing over mountains back into Poland, her exploits included smuggling out microfilm showing Hitler’s plans to invade the Soviet Union and escaping the Gestapo after biting her tongue to feign the bloody symptoms of tuberculosis.
In 1944, in France, she marched into a jail posing as General Bernard Montgomery’s niece to successfully demand the release of fellow agents from a German officer with bribes and threats of retribution if he didn’t comply.
Reckoned to be the inspiration for Vesper Lynd in Fleming’s Casino Royale, she was murdered in 1952, aged 44, by an obsessed suitor.
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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
