May 16, 2025 • 55 mins
In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we discuss the 2019 historical drama A Call to Spy, which follows the real-life wartime missions of Virginia Hall, Noor Inayat Khan, and Vera Atkins — three extraordinary women recruited into Churchill’s Special Operations Executive during WWII.
We explore what the film gets right, where it fictionalises, and how the true stories behind these women are even more astonishing than what made it to the screen. We also reflect on why telling these stories now matters more than ever, as the generation that witnessed them is rapidly disappearing.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Welcome to Rosie the Reviewer. We're your host.
I'm Sam. And I'm.
And we like World War 2 media, and we want to talk about it.
Welcome back to Rosie the reviewer.
This week we are talking about the movie A Call to Spy, which
came out in 2019. It was directed by Lydia Dean
(00:23):
Pilcher and written and producedby Sarah Megan Thomas, who also
acts in it. And she portrays Virginia Hall.
It's based on the true story of Special Operations executive Spy
Master Vera Atkins and Special Agents Virginia Hall and Noor
Anayat Khan, who were stationed in France during World War 2.
What did you think of this movie?
I have some next feelings about this movie because I'd never
(00:45):
heard of it before and I found it online and I was like, oh
this is cool, this is all about spy ladies.
And I was like, yes, finally. And then I watched the movie and
it's fine. You know, it's just kind of, and
the movie making is kind of average.
It follows more or less 3 storylines and it feels almost
like it should be a limited series, but it's only a movie so
(01:07):
I feel like the stories weren't fully fledged and also there
wasn't a whole lot of depth to it.
But it didn't make me research awhole lot so that's good.
How about you? Yeah, I thought it kind of the
same problem as the Pacific where they're trying to tell
three separate plot lines and maybe they're not doing them
(01:28):
justice. Especially I found the newer
plot line got a bit sidelined infavor of the Virginia plot line.
And they're all super fascinating women and honestly
could probably have their own movie or as you said, their own
mini series. So yeah, I thought it was fine,
like you said. And anytime I see a movie like
this and I'm like, I wonder why I haven't heard of it.
I'm like, I bet there's a reason.
(01:48):
And yeah, it's one of those oneswhere I really wanted it to be
good and it's just, it's fine. It's all right.
I don't like my time back or anything.
And like you said, it did lead me down some fun rabbit holes.
So there is that. I think I might watch it again
just because I did all the research before and then watched
it, but I did a bunch more research afterwards and I just
(02:12):
maybe want to see what they did and didn't do.
And I'll say there's a thing andthen I'll shut up and we can get
into it. But there's something about the
music, like the production valueis pretty high.
Like production design is beautiful and the acting is
fine, but the music feels like very lifetime me to me.
(02:33):
Why? But it does.
Yeah, yeah, I'll buy that for sure.
All right, let's get into the plot.
We've got some opening cards. France falls to the Nazis.
Britain stands alone. Winston Churchill hastily
(02:55):
creates a spy agency to disrupt the Nazi war machine.
Its mission in France place spies everywhere to build
resistance and conduct sabotage.But there are no experienced
spies. For this new type of warfare, a
call must go out to amateurs. The first few are dropped behind
enemy lines to begin a secret war inspired by true stories.
It's a long opening card for sure and the font is rare in
(03:19):
this. Looks like it was done by my 15
year old cousin. Sometimes I find the opening and
closing cards we get in these movies are not strictly
necessary because you're about to find out the same information
in the movie. I don't know that this provided
necessarily contacts that we couldn't have picked up on in
(03:39):
the first few scenes, but I mean, it was there so I guess it
doesn't hurt. Yeah, I feel like you're right.
They do a whole lot of exposition to in the 1st 15
minutes of the movie and most ofit's in there, so you're right.
But I mean it is a World War 2 movie and they usually have
opening cards, so maybe it's just a trope that can't be
(04:01):
untrouped. How do I get hired to write the
opening and closing cards for World War 2 movies?
Yeah. So the movie starts in earnest.
We see it is August 1941. American ASRI agent Virginia
Hall, played by Sarah Megan Thomas, is being tortured by
German officers but won't revealher real name.
(04:21):
She calls herself Virgin Virginia Hall was pretty
legendary. She was infamous amongst the
Germans who called the limping lady will seek her out.
Why? In a minute.
And the most dangers of all Allied agents.
I do wonder why, but she was thefirst female agent to operate in
Vichy France and she worked across Europe and various
(04:43):
American embassies throughout the 1930s.
And she also volunteered as an ambulance driver for the French
Army prior to the fall of Francein 1940.
So she got around. Yeah, I think because it's
trying to tell so many plot lines this movie doesn't
necessarily give her. I read a biography of her called
A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Pernell a couple of years
(05:04):
ago, and it's really hard to express how much she was really
the crux around which a huge amount of Allied intelligence
rotated on the continent. This woman had her fingers in so
many pies. She was involved in so many
projects on the ground. She organized fighter groups.
Right at the end of the war, shewas in the Austrian mountains
(05:25):
organizing resistance groups against the Germans.
She was heavily involved and at one point in the war she was
actually the most wanted Allied agent.
The Germans were dying to catch her.
Yeah, What made me laugh when I read about her was obviously
they call her the Linton Lady. She has a prosthetic leg and she
lives. But later she dressed up as an
(05:46):
old woman, has her disguise so they wouldn't suspect her as
much and just it's so smart. Yeah, she would literally go up
to the Germans disguise as an old woman and sell them cheese
that she had made. And she would use that
opportunity to eavesdrop on their conversations.
This woman was fearless. She would do anything.
How easy would it have been for her to just be caught in that
(06:07):
moment? She's always so close.
Yeah, it's wild. The book really takes you
through. She just spent such a long
period of time and she was neversafe.
She was always on the move. Even when she was putting her
head down at night in a place where she knew the people and
she should have been safe. She knew that she might have to
get up in the night and move. She couldn't stay in one place
(06:29):
because the Germans would catch her and it just seems like such
an immensely stressful life and she just took to it like a duck
to water. Yeah.
I wonder, I don't know if you remember from the book, but do
we know specifically why she joined?
Yes, we. Well, she wanted to be a
diplomat. That was her whole thing.
That was her lifetime dream. And she applied three or four
(06:50):
times, I think, to the diplomatic service.
And she kept getting rejected. And she worked in several
embassies across Europe. And then when she got pretty
much as it happens in the movie,she was approached at a party by
Vera Atkins. And Vera was like, do you want
to actually put your skills to good use and be taken seriously?
And she was really interested inthat.
I do like the, I guess we're kind of getting ahead of
(07:11):
ourselves a little, but I do like the little letter we see
her write about how just becauseshe has a disability doesn't
mean she can't be useful. And I felt that.
Yeah, she genuinely did write toFDR as well.
This woman was she's not afraid to go over someone's head.
She's like me. I just write him to all the
actors. Yeah, exactly.
(07:32):
Well, flashback to three months earlier at the SOEHQF section in
London, the leader of the Frenchsection of the SOE, his name is
Maurice Buckmaster. He's played by Linus Roach.
He's meeting with his right handpeople to discuss the difficulty
in keeping radio operators alive.
It's a super, super dangerous job.
Basically, what they would do isyou'd have an entire circuit of
(07:54):
agents operating in France, collaborating with the
resistance and what you might have one radio operator or two.
And the problem is that the Germans were getting really,
really good at tracking down thesignal of these radio operators.
And so they could find you within 20 minutes.
So if you're trying to transmit information from your circuit
back to London, you had to tap out this message and then you
(08:16):
had to get the fuck out of there.
And they had these aerials that they had to put out because this
is the technology of the time, right, These big transmitters.
And they would have to to try and disguise them with clothes
lines or disguise them in a tree.
But it's like a 70 foot aerial that you have to hide.
And they reached a point where it was so dangerous.
The Germans were getting so goodat finding them that they were
like, OK, well, we're not going to transmit where we sleep
(08:37):
anymore. So that means you have to go out
into a park or a public place and find somewhere to hide your
aerial transmit and then fuck off.
And you can't use the same placetwice.
And so these people had crazy, crazy dangerous jobs.
They were constantly getting picked up by the Germans and
disappeared. So that's kind of where they're
at right now in a lot of they'rehaving difficulty maintaining
connections with their circuits because they can't keep radio
(08:59):
operators alive. And we get introduced to Vera
Atkins, played by Stana Katic. She's one of our main
characters, and she gets assigned to recruit women to
their cause. Women are obviously going to be
a little bit more inconspicuous,more likely to be underestimated
perhaps. And there was also a sense, I
think, that women, especially atthe time and the way they move
(09:21):
through the world, had to be a bit more observant, had to be a
bit more aware of danger or how they were coming off to other
people or how to smooth things over, how not to make waves.
So they, a lot of people did seethe value in having female
agents. So she's sent out to recruit
female agents. And one of the other agents said
to her, make sure they're pretty.
Yeah, this line, man, I, I don'tknow, I really like minus Roach
(09:46):
as Maurice Burgmaster. I thought he was fantastic in
this. It's nice to see kind of a man
take a back seat to his 2nd and taken with Christ instead of
just being offended all the timeby it.
So I did kind of like it. But you're right, a woman were
unrespected even by Maurice Bugmaster at the beginning.
He was like, I don't know, but let's try.
(10:08):
We have no interruptions. So I don't know.
I did really like this part obviously, because we've seen
very before. She's also portrayed in colorful
name with pride where she servedas a recruiter and mentor, a
friend of the pod. Do you like Sambo?
So that was really cool and real.
They were actually consultants on the movie and I did not know
(10:29):
this. Pretty cool.
Vera was a cool lady. She was a multilingual Jewish
Romanian woman who was recruitedbefore the war by Canadian
spymaster Sir William Stevenson and he was actually the
inspiration for James Bond. And if we talk about X Company
in a few episodes, we'll talk more about him as well, because
he was also the founder of Camp X in Ontario that trained a lot
(10:51):
of these agents or kind of in their initial training stage.
And he recruited her to do Reconin Europe before the war about
the rising fascist threat. She joined the SOE in 1941 and
she became indispensable to Colonel Buckmaster,
unfortunately, because she was aforeigner, because she was
Jewish, because she was a woman,her progress through the agency
(11:11):
was really Hanford. She was the right hand man in
all respects of Colonel Buckmaster, but she had a really
hard time getting promoted on paper, getting paid more,
getting an actual promotion rather than just having all this
work piled on her. But she was still an assistant
kind of thing. They show it in the movie, too.
She wants her papers, she wants to be British, and they keep
(11:34):
denying her appeal for that. And they do show it in the movie
quite a bit, but again, they do so because they're trying to do
so many things at once. None of it's really all that
convincing to me, which is a shame because you can tell that
they really tried, but they maybe tried a little bit too
much. For sure it's too much.
(11:54):
No, I agree. So next we get the bit we were
talking about briefly before. Virginia is working away in our
embassy job but she's been rejected many times and she
meets Vera at the party and soonVera recruits her and nor any
outcome played by Radhika FT as he already operates her.
So this party I thought was kindof strange.
(12:17):
They make it pretty clear that Jews aren't necessarily popular
in Britain either. They have a little mention of
and that makes if you are very uncomfortable and she moves
around, meets Virginia who then later apologizes for being weird
at the party. And I didn't really see that in
the movie, so I was really quiteconfused about that.
(12:38):
One of the things, you know, they obviously tried to write
sort of a interweaving plot linefor Khan and Hall in this movie.
But one of the things I would have liked to see a bit more of
was Paul having worked as a ambulance driver before the fall
of France in 1940. She had seen a lot of the
terrible shit the Nazis were doing.
(13:00):
You know, she had been right there in the teeth of the German
advanced. And Khan, before her family fled
from France, had seen the same thing.
They'd had to evacuate Paris. She had seen bodies laying face
down next to the road. And so both of these women were
haunted by what they had seen ofthe German war machine.
And that is part of what inspired them to get involved
(13:22):
with this. So it would have been cool to
kind of see that a bit more as they developed their
camaraderie. Yeah, and this is the first time
the movie deviates from the actual industry because Noor and
Virginia weren't at the history at the same time, because Noor
didn't join until 1943. But she was a part of the
(13:43):
Women's Auxiliary Air Force, where she trained as a radio
operator, and she was ultimatelythe first female radio operator
sent into. And this lady was so strange and
eccentric and interesting. And we watched documentaries and
listened to podcasts and she's just so interesting.
Yeah, there is a podcast called the Spy Who and they have a four
(14:05):
part series on Noor in a yacht con and it's so interesting.
Y'all. You should definitely listen to
it. She was a person who wrote
stories for children. Like, she had published some,
like, children's books. And yeah, she was raised as a
pacifist, and she wanted to get involved in the war in a way
that didn't involve killing. She had initially planned on
being a nurse, but she thought that wouldn't be enough.
(14:27):
And reading a lot of the reportson her, she was afraid of firing
a weapon. A lot of people had
misconceptions about sending herover there.
And then when she went over, sheperformed super well.
But she made mistakes where, youknow, because she wasn't fully
trained, she may not have made those mistakes if she had more
experience. And ultimately a lot of these
(14:48):
factors got her killed. So her story is really sad, but
she's such an interesting person.
I don't know if this this isn't a podcast because you listen to
the podcast and I watch documentary, but during her
training, her final sign off came from Leo Marx.
And he apparently had to kind ofadjust the way he taught her how
(15:08):
to code because she didn't get it at 1st.
And he was like, because she wasalso the woman who didn't lie.
So she never lied. She didn't want to lie to the he
was like, all right, but he can't lie about the codes
either, so they need to be real.And I thought this was so clever
from Neo Marx. He's only 22.
(15:29):
At the time, I didn't even know how to make my own dinner at 22
or so. Leo Marx was the code master at
the SOE who also trained Violat Sabo, and yeah, clearly a guy
who really knew what he was doing.
He'll surface a bit later in themovie as well, but I guess we'll
get to that. So there's a training montage.
Virginia and Noor become friends.
The torture scene that we saw atthe beginning is revealed to be
(15:52):
from Virginia's final Test to complete her training.
So it wasn't real. They're just putting them
through this thing. Apparently in real life, Noor
went through that as well. They dragged her into a room and
they were like, who are you working for?
Blah, blah, blah, you know, in the dead of night kind of thing.
Drag you out of bed. So yeah, the training wasn't any
joke. And the women got the same
training as the men, same hand to hand combat stuff, same
(16:13):
everything, virtually because they had to be able to survive
in the same way that the men would have to survive in this
completely hostile environment where everyone is getting for
you. Yeah.
And we also see a little bit of nervous hesitation in this scene
because she sees everybody else fighting and killing, and she's
the one reading a book, not touching a weapon.
(16:34):
So that's a little nod to her pacifism.
So the word. Is that the word?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Virginia, meanwhile, wants to be
a badass. Apparently she put lipstick on
this knife, and when they were doing fake killing, they had to
go up behind a dummy and slash its throat.
She slashed it with this knife that she had put lipstick all
over so it looked like it was bleeding.
I'm like, OK, that's fucking intense, Virginia.
(16:56):
So Virginia does all this with her presented like Cuthbert.
I can't even pronounce the word Cuthbert.
It's so hard to pronounce, but just imagine just naming your
leg. Yeah, she was in a hunting
accident and she got gangrene, so she had a wooden leg, which
was why the Germans called her the Limping Lady.
And Despite that, despite her very obvious and familiar walk,
(17:20):
they never caught her so. By that, yeah, finally they get
sent into action in Lyon, September 1941.
It is Virginia who gets her first.
She arrives in Bushi, France andmakes her contact.
Doctor Shaban, played by Rusty Sutherland, VA, hits a gun
(17:40):
running as expected from her organizing rescue for an inter
colleague during Recon and recruiting other resistant
members. And this was true too.
For all I'm complaining about the movie, The movie does a
pretty good job at getting most of the deal.
Right for sure. And also may I mention Rossif
Sutherland is the son of famous actor Donald Sutherland and the
(18:02):
half brother of Kiefer Sutherland.
How did I not know this? I know this guy sooner and other
things but I did not know this. Well, I mean, I'm Canadian and
we know everyone who is Canadian, so.
Ask him to be in the broadcast owners you know.
Yeah, well, there's only 12 of us up here, you see, So we do
all know each other. That's how I know.
(18:23):
Yeah. Lyon was a major center of
French resistance in World War 2.
They paid a heavy price. When the Allies landed, many of
the captured resistance members were executed en masked by the
Germans to kind of set an example.
And the resistance actually tookover this nearby village called
Viet Ban for three days in late August 1944.
Like just imagine these are civilians and they take over
(18:46):
this whole area from the Nazis and then Leo itself ended up
being liberated by the allies onSeptember 3rd.
So the network in Leo was calledProsper.
I believe it was one of the biggest, if not the biggest
networks in France. So it's huge.
New York is about to be sent to France.
They're in a situation where their last radio operator has
(19:09):
been killed and they don't have a way to get information from
their resistance circuits. And so they're like, we need to
send someone in and nobody is really prepared.
But newer is sort of less unprepared than everyone else.
And a lot of people have reservations about sending her
in, but Vera really believes in her.
So she's about to be sent in. She's not fully trained.
And she gets there and immediately police search her
(19:32):
initial safe house and she makesa narrow escape.
So action-packed straight away. And it's similar to what
happened in real life. She met her contacts and her
contacts. Super jealous girlfriend, which
tie a ribbon around that becauseit's relevant later.
So she meets her contact, the contact's jealous girlfriend
named Renee. And then she meets up with this
(19:52):
other guy who's a radio operator, kind of like outside
of town. She's supposed to be operating
in Paris, they think, and he's like out in the stick somewhere.
But her radio hasn't landed yet.So she has to go and make
contact with this guy. And then literally it's like her
first or second day and some guycomes running up and he's like,
you got to go. The Gestapo arrested the guy you
just met and they're coming here.
(20:13):
So she has to like, bury the aerial in the ground.
So it can't be found and then fuck off out of there.
And and she she doesn't know if her contact is burned.
She doesn't know if these peoplethat she's met have been
compromised. It's a whole thing.
It sounds super intense. I don't know how I would respond
to it, but yeah. And I feel like Nora was a very
good radio operator, but she wasn't too aware of stuff going
(20:38):
on around her. If you read her like training
reports, and they all seem to think she's not not too smart.
Like she's really good of this job, but not social awareness or
people. She's got kind of a different
kind of wiring almost. Yeah, I think deeply naive might
be one way to put it. There's a bit in the podcast
(20:58):
where they talk about how when she first meets her contact in
Paris, they told her it was going to be an old lady.
And she shows up at the apartment with flowers and she's
already, and she's rehearsed hercode message, She's ready to go.
And then the person who opens the door is not an old lady, but
a young man. And she completely forgets what
she supposed to say. She's like, oh, I think you're
expecting me. And he's like, I don't know, am
(21:19):
I expecting you? And then basically, because she
looks scared shitless, he made her come inside.
And then gradually they established that he was, in
fact, the right guy that she wassupposed to meet.
But imagine if he had been a collaborator with the Nazis or
just some guy like. Yeah, it's, I just found her so
interesting. I just, I want to go and listen
to the podcast. I feel like I'd eat that up.
(21:41):
You should. That's really interesting.
So we need more new people. We meet a lot of people in this
movie. We meet Father Robert Alesh,
played by Joe Doyle, and he alsoseeks out Doctor Shiva for
protection since he is a well known anti fastest printer in
France and Virginia. Who's with Doctor Shiva still?
(22:02):
They're kind of friendly at thispoint.
I'm working together. She's immediately suspicious of
him, but she's overruled by London because London checks up
on this guy and says, yeah, he'slegit, he's OK, you can trust
him. Yeah, so Alesh was a Catholic
priest who pretended to be an anti fascist because he saw the
(22:23):
opportunity to make money by infiltrating all these anti
fascist rings and working for the Germans.
So he would basically encourage and foment resistance activities
and then turn in the perpetrators.
Like when cops set up a sting operation where they basically
make the criminal do it and thenturn them in.
He became an advair agent working directly for the
Germans. He infiltrated the French
Resistance Gloria network in Paris, which as a result was and
(22:46):
afterward, he made contact with Virginia Hall, claiming to be an
agent of Gloria and being like, oh, I have all this intelligence
for you. So crazy.
I'm the only one who survived. And she was like, that seems to
us. But like you said, she got
overruled and many members of her network were captured and
killed based on information thatFather Alesh passed to the
Germans. And he ultimately was executed
(23:07):
by firing squad for his crimes in 1949.
Took a while though. I wonder how many people died
because of him. Yeah, a lot.
I feel like that's just similar what we've read about the
comment line. It happened all the time.
The Malaysians were written everywhere.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, the US gets involved in
the war. And up until this point,
(23:27):
Virginia has been using more or less her real identity.
She's been going around and pretending to be a reporter.
And now that the US is involved in the war, obviously Americans
are not going to be chill anymore.
So she has to go deeper undercover and kind of switch up
what she's been doing. Newer moves on to Paris to take
up an even riskier post. So there's a good chunk of time
where she is the only active radio operator in Paris.
(23:50):
And meanwhile, back in England, Vera discovers that she's not
going to get her citizenship paper.
So as you said, this is kind of Vera's subplot.
She is sort of criminally underrated by all of her
colleagues and the people aroundher.
I was going to say that she's got to fight for her right to
party, but it's not to party, it's to be taken just the least
bit seriously. Yeah, right.
(24:12):
Also, I love nurse cover storiesthat she's a children's a
kindergarten teacher. I feel like that's so fitting to
who she was. Well, she studied child
psychology at the Sorbonne, I believe, before the war.
Oh, that makes sense. And you explained to me I
somehow didn't pick up on this, but cover stories and names are
(24:33):
usually as close to your life aspossible, so you don't have to
lie as much. So you can't as easily get
caught in a lie. And it makes sense, actually.
Yeah, you've put in a little funny note here.
It's just Virginia does leader is shut like she she goes full
on SAS work heroes and does somereal life sabotage and helps her
(24:54):
assistance guy escape from jail and she set up a bunch of sad
houses. So in the movie we only get to
see maybe one operation where she does a little real life
sabotage. But in real life she did many of
these things all of the time. I feel like she took so many
risks that other people wouldn'thave taken.
Oh, yeah, She's straight up getting people out of jail.
(25:17):
She's organizing weapons drops. She's organizing this resistance
cell. And that resistance cell, like
this woman is involved in literally everything.
And she is not afraid of, you know, doing super dangerous
shit. The whole thing where she's
getting someone to smuggle things into the prison so these
guys can escape. And then she sets up the safe
house for them after. You just arrive in France, a
(25:39):
country in which you do not liveand you're not maybe super
familiar with, and you're like, yeah, I can do this task that
requires an intimate knowledge of the locale.
I had heard of Virginia before because of the book you
mentioned, but before that therewasn't a whole lot known about
her because she wasn't a lady who would like to talk about her
excellence. So for a long time people didn't
(26:01):
know that she was this amazing woman, which is probably why
there aren't any other movies about her yet.
There's one in the pipeline somewhere that we're hoping
that's made someday. So there's hoping.
Yeah, I think a lot of these guys after the OR took their vow
of secrecy really seriously. And so we're finding out in the
(26:21):
past few years, a lot of super old ladies who die, and then it
turns out that they were in the SOE and they never told anybody.
Yeah, of course SOE files were restricted for long, long time.
But men are more likely to tell than women.
Maybe women are just better at keeping secrets.
Maybe that's why they make such good spies.
(26:41):
I also just think that nobody would have asked them, right?
Like nobody, you're probably You're not asking your grandma
what she did during the war, right?
No, you do not ask your grandpa and you moved your grandma
because you just assumed that your grandma was at home taking
care of the kids. Yeah, I think after the war to a
lot of these women got railroaded out of continuing in
(27:03):
this line of work. I mean, we see it, it happened
to Virginia and it happened to alot of the women involved where
it was like, Oh, well, there's no place for you in a post war
CIA or whatever the case may be,right?
Yeah, that's true. I mean, they were still women in
a time where women did not have it easy.
But some of them didn't let thatstop them.
(27:23):
And these women are all prime examples of that.
So I'm still really glad this movie's out there.
For sure. So we're still in the own It's
November of 1942 at this point. If you'll recall from our SAS
Real Heroes episodes, November of 1942 was Operation Torch.
The Allies are invading North Africa, and when Germany loses
(27:44):
control of French North Africa, that's when they decide we're
going to get rid of all pretenseof there being this independent
French government, and we're going to occupy the rest of
France. And obviously, the Germans
tightening their grip on France is not good news for our SOE
agents. We see that Father Alesh is in
fact working for the Nazis, including Klaus Barbie, who was
(28:05):
known as the Butcher of Lyon, played by Mark Grisman in this
movie. And Noor knows that she's in
grave danger but refuses to fleeto safety.
And at this point, a lot of Noor's compatriots and picked up
by the Gestapo, they knew that she was a woman of Indian
descent. They knew her code name
Madeleine. They knew a ton of information
(28:27):
about her. And they also had some of her
friends in custody. And one of them, they got him
basically at gunpoint to call her and be like, come meet me in
this park. And she luckily knew that it was
a trap, but the walls were closing in on her effectively.
And the SOA decided at that point, like, we have to get her
out of there. And she's like, I'm not going,
(28:48):
I'm going to stay because I'm the only radio operator in
Paris, and someone has to do it.Yeah.
And they didn't just tell her once, right?
It was a couple times that she just refused to evacuate.
And I feel like part of that is being really brave, and part of
that is taking responsibility. But the other part is, like you
said, maybe a bit of naivete. Yeah, for her, she just didn't
(29:11):
want to leave until there was someone else who could do what
she could do. So she's like, well you better
finish training them and send someone new over.
If not until you do, I'm staying.
You know this. Her job was so important. close
Barbie, head of the Gestapo in Lyon.
He was known for personally torturing prisoners which is why
they called him the butcher of Lyon.
And then after the war he assisted the US with anti
(29:32):
communist activities and they helped him escape to South
America where he advised the dictatorial regime in Bolivia on
repressing opposition and probably assisted in a military
coup in 1980. So he lived a nice long free
life. Thank you USA.
And then he was eventually caught and convicted of war
crimes and crimes against humanity, and he died in prison
in 1991. You can't see this podcast, but
(29:54):
I'm just leaning my head on a microphone being really
disappointed with America right now.
Yeah, the US government actuallyapologized in the 80s for
helping him get away and escaping justice.
Well, that didn't say if anybodydid it.
No, it really didn't. And it didn't prevent Claus
Barbie, a terrible person, from living a long and fruitful life
(30:15):
where he helped more people get hurt in South America.
All right, now we've done that. Virginia is known to the Gestapo
and they are looking for her. As we said, they find her very
dangerous and they want to catchher really badly.
Doctor Chaffet is arrested. This made me I said one of her
other compatriot is shot practically in front of her.
(30:37):
The scene was awful but she has to act like she doesn't know him
so she works faster. In the movie as he's on his
knees surrounded by German officers or s s officers
specifically, it just is to keepgoing as he can't stop and it's
so bad. But then thankfully, when she's
trying to get out, she gets to buy a train ticket and there's a
(31:00):
train ticket guy in the booth and he's watching her and is
looking at this little hit list of people that they're looking
for. And he sees her and he collects
her and he looks at her. And then all he says is Bunker
Raj. It's the best part of the entire
region. I agree with you.
That's your night, but I agree. Yeah, I love the small everyday
(31:21):
acts of resistance and courage from people.
I mean, that always gets me. Makes you wonder how many other
people he's said the same. Thank you while looking at this
little hit list. Yeah, I don't think was a real
person, but Virginia did have three men I think that she
worked with quite a lot in France that she called her
nephews sort of jokingly. And if I'm not mistaken, all
(31:44):
three of them were captured and killed by the Germans.
And she did spend a lot of time trying to get them out and
couldn't. It's so tough, man.
I don't understand how in general like resistance.
And as we got people out of jailso often, I mean, more often
they failed. But the thieves, they, they had
to get them out. They're pretty risky, risking
(32:05):
the lives of many people to get one person back out.
It's a pretty scary operation todo.
But I mean, because the resistance was getting caught
and infiltrated by the Germans so often, they just really
couldn't afford to not do that. I think there's a bit in the
podcast where they're talking about how newer at one point is
(32:28):
basically one of the very few people left in a circuit, and
she's trying to recruit new members of the resistance based
on people that she knew growing up because she grew up in
France. Imagine you're having to try and
recruit other spies on the fly based on people you haven't
spoken to in like 15 years. Yeah, Noor gets snitched on and
arrested. And earlier when I said put a
(32:50):
ribbon around jealous Renee, thegirlfriend of Nora's first
resistance contact in Paris. Well, Renee didn't like Noor.
And now I think maybe she was a little jealous of Nora around
her boyfriend. And she contacted the Nazis and
was like, I can give you this lady you're looking for in
exchange for 100,000 francs, which sounds like a lot of
(33:11):
money, but it's really like, buya few new nice dresses money.
It's not even that much money. It's not 30 pieces of silver.
It's just like giving someone 500 bucks.
And the Nazis were like, oh, yeah, yeah, no problem.
You can have your 100,000 francs.
You sure drive a hard bargain. And yeah, because of this woman
and Noor gets arrested. And it's, gosh, it's awful
(33:32):
because because of her incomplete training, she
misunderstood this thing that they had told her about filing
all of your codes. And she thought that she was
supposed to write them down. So she had this notebook full of
codes that had a lot of incriminating information in it.
And she was on her last day in France.
The. SO we were going to fly her out.
She only had to make it uncaptured for one more day.
(33:54):
The Gestapo we're closing in. But she could have just hit out
somewhere and kept her head. But she knew that that book of
codes that could get a lot of people killed was in her
apartment. So she was like, well, I gotta
risk it. So she went back to her
apartment, and that's when she got caught.
Jesus. Yeah.
Once she gets caught, the Germans have her radio and all
of her codes. So now they can transmit as her
(34:17):
back to London. And Leo Marks, played by
Alistair Brammer, suspects that the Germans are transmitting
using her code, but he gets overruled.
So what had happened was before the war, before she went, not
before the war, but before she went into France, he was like,
if you ever transmit to me a sentence of exactly 18
characters, I will know that youare compromised.
(34:38):
And she's like, OK, I will neversend you a sentence with 18
characters in it, like, ever. So he gets this transmission
from, quote UN quote, newer, andthere's a sentence in it that's
18 characters. And he's like, I know that's not
her. She wouldn't do that.
And everyone else is like, yeah,but remember how she used to
make all those mistakes in training?
And he's like, she would not make this mistake.
And they were like, it's probably fine, like we'll keep
(35:00):
an eye on it, but it's probably OK.
So months go by where they're getting these transmissions
from, quote UN quote, Noor, and they're starting to trust her
again. They send in all these new
agents that parachute in and they get delivered right into
the arms of the Gestapo, of course.
And that's when they know for sure that Noor has been captured
and she's going to be disappeared.
(35:21):
So the Germans had this thing called Noxu Nebel, which means
night and fog, and it was a directive issued by Adolf Hitler
on the 7th of December 1941. Basically, whenever the Gestapo
picked up political activists, members of the resistance, that
kind of stuff, they would disappear them.
And their idea was that they didn't want your family and
(35:42):
friends to know what happened toyou because that creates this
atmosphere of fear and not knowing, and that would make
people be less likely to act outagainst the regime.
And also the other would be thatif they didn't know what had
happened to you, they could evenmisuse your identity like they
did with nor. So that's the other one.
And I'll I'll give you the full German pronunciation just for
(36:05):
fun. It's not UN neighbor.
There you go, and it's pretty. Horrible.
Like it's such a almost poetic way of being very evil.
Yeah, and unfortunately part of the reason why Noor got caught
in the 1st place was because of the same kind of thing.
There was 2 Canadian agents thatgot picked up and and these two
French agents managed to escape.They had the radio in the back
(36:28):
of their car and they're like weneed to destroy this radio so
that the Germans can't radio back to London pretending to be
these two Canadians that they caught.
So the one guy drove the car as hard as he could into a barrier
to try and blow it up. Unfortunately the car was not
destroyed. The Germans were able to
retrieve the radio they were transmitting back to London as
these two Canadians. London was none the wiser.
(36:49):
And so it was these quote UN quote 2 Canadians who were like,
oh, send a newer to this this place at this time, you know, do
this and that sure parachute people here.
And so part of the reason why Nora got caught was this exact
same kind of thing had happened to some other agents.
It's no. Horrible, but a slight deviation
I think from real life in the movie with Nora is that it's not
(37:11):
her female friend that that's right, it's her boyfriend who
does it. So I wonder why they changed
that. Yeah, I don't know.
Maybe they didn't want to like be like, I don't know, not
support or something because thegirlfriend or the friend is
actually like, she feels sorry as soon as it happens, but yeah.
(37:31):
Yeah, I mean, that friend is a different person from Renee.
They're not the same person. No, right.
But they could have used that story, right?
Yeah, I mean, Noor did have, like I said, she did have lots
of friends in Paris from when she had lived there, and she did
periodically make contact with those people, but she wouldn't
have stayed with them because she knew that it was super,
(37:52):
super dangerous. Like if she got caught everyone
would get shot. Yeah, so meanwhile, Virginia
also still has to get the fuck out of Dodge and she hikes to
safety via the gurneys, which isa hellish journey.
And also, she's got a so good luck on that.
Her entire circuit had been compromised at this point.
And I saw you won't send her back into action.
(38:14):
So she needs to get a job with the RSS instead.
But first she has to make it back.
And it's a tough journey. And I was actually a funny
little anecdote here to deal with her leg cut first because
she was tracking over the Pyrenees kind of having a hard
time and she radioed the SRE andwe're saying cut the bird is
(38:35):
different trouble. So as we didn't realize that she
had named her like that, they thought she meant an actual
person. So they replied that is
constipered from being problematic.
She should probably have him eliminated.
Funny, I'm sure she got a kick out of that.
I'm sure. Gira finally gets her papers.
(38:57):
It's 1944 at this point, I think, though she does get
thoroughly razzed for not predicting that Father Alesh
would sell them out, because I believe she was the one who sort
of checked into his background. She and Virginia, who is now
back, must go tell Noor's motherof her death.
And it's man. Like I just cannot overstate how
much of A bummer this scene is. They go tell this poor woman
(39:18):
that her daughter has died and they're outside of the house and
this lady closes the door and all of a sudden she just lets
out this like guttural, heart wrenching scream because her
child is dead. And it's brutal.
And then we see Nord's death play out.
We see her executed in Dachau concentration camp.
And we also hear her final wordsas they were recorded.
(39:41):
Or it's not sure that she said this, but that I know word was
liberty, so freedom. Yeah, the Nazi who killed her
passed that story along, so that's charming.
Nice, I think nice very sarcastically guys, I don't
everything can Nazi is nice. Yeah, yeah.
And there's a there's a quote from the Persian poet Rumi that
(40:02):
gets repeated throughout the movie.
Noor's mother, I think, says it to her at one point.
She says it to Virginia. And then when Virginia goes to
see Noor's mother after her death, she repeats it back to
her. And it's don't you know yet?
It's your light that lights the world and that just made me very
sad. And Norah's name, Norah's first
name and her full name. I think it's Nor Anissa or
(40:25):
something Means light among women.
So that's literally a reference to that.
So while Dale Donovan, played byMatt Salinger, has a little
cameo and he tells Brad that they're sending Virginia back
into the field with the new radio operator training.
So she's joined the OSS. So she gets to be an agent
(40:45):
again, just not for the SRE. Yeah, they've gone to school on
the British a little bit. Obviously, this was a totally
new kind of warfare. And so the British had learned a
lot through trial and error, which unfortunately was very
costly in the price of human life.
And so they sort of changed the way they were doing things where
they were gonna have much smaller cells of three people
and they would have a radio operator in each cell so they
(41:07):
wouldn't be so reliant on this one person who is so easy for
the Germans to catch. Yeah, did we see Rob, Bill
Donovan and the catcher was a spy.
He wasn't the catcher as a spy yet.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought so.
I just couldn't remember. Yeah.
And we get some super long end cards.
After returning to France, Virginia Hall helped organize an
(41:28):
armed 3 resistance battalions and reported on the enemy by
wireless. Klaus Barbie never caught her.
Virginia's betrayer father Aleshwas executed by the French.
Cited for her rare courage. Virginia was the only civilian
woman awarded the US Distinguished Service Cross in
World War 2. Cuthbert.
Her prosthesis is memorial, I realized on a Congressional Gold
Medal. After the war, Virginia tried
(41:49):
again to become a diplomat. She was rejected.
Later, she became the first female agent for a new spy
organization, the CIA. Yeah, wow.
She didn't have a very good timeat the CIA though, right?
It wasn't easy for her being on the CIA.
Yeah, she worked there until sheretired.
They ended up naming a training facility after her in 20
seventeens, the Virginia Hall Expeditionary Center.
(42:10):
But it really took a long time for her to get recognition, and
her colleagues even acknowledgedthat she was often overlooked
for promotion and recognition because she had such a
significant amount of experienceand skill set that her superiors
didn't have. They were intimidated by her.
A lot of the men that she workedwith didn't want to take her
seriously because they knew thatshe knew more than them.
(42:33):
You're smarter than us. We don't like you or not.
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, right.
Yeah. Is this still the end card?
Oh yeah. My God, it's long.
I've already forgotten how long.So the second part of the end
card has to do with Vera Atkins.Vera Atkins was honored by the
British and the French. This was a section head, Colonel
(42:54):
Buckmaster. By D-Day, hundreds of their
spies, working with the Resistance and the Allies, were
running missions centered by thelarge number of spies missing at
war's end. Vera spearheaded an
investigation into her food. She visited concentration camps,
interrogated Nazi officials and participated in war crime
(43:15):
prosecutions, Farrah confirmed. All but one had died, she said.
I could not just abandoned theirmemory as sexist.
War contributions came at a devastating cost.
About one in three agents sent to France died, including 13 of
various 39 female agents. That number man is so harsh.
(43:36):
Yeah, there is some thought thatshe may have been so invested in
doing these investigations afterthe war out of a sense of guilt
because is there was an inquiry,right?
They said that her and Buckmaster should have known
that a lot of these circuits were compromised.
They should not have kept sending new agents in when they
didn't know what had happened tothe last ones.
And I think there's sort of a, you know, there's a fine line to
(43:59):
be walked between. They're in a wartime situation.
They're making decisions on the fly based on very little
information. And then at the same time, you
know, maybe they were a little reckless.
And so, though she never admitted to you making any
mistakes, you can tell from her actions that she probably felt a
little responsible. Yeah, I read a little article
(44:19):
about her saying that she went to Athensbrook and interrogated
one of the executioners who helped identify Viola Teva for
one, and the three or two other agents also executed at the same
time. But this lady, she was
determined to just get every single answer that was out
(44:42):
there. It just makes me wonder what
happened to the that she couldn't find.
There was only one. Noor Eniac Khan was captured
less than four months after she arrived in France.
And I've quit here. I think the way they word this
under cells that a little bit, Ithink that really rather than
capture less than four months after she arrived in France,
which doesn't sound that impressive, it's She evaded
(45:05):
capture for more than three months at a time when the
Germans were getting better and better at detecting
transmissions. And the lifespan for an
undercover radio operator was six weeks.
And even her colleagues back in London were suitably impressed
by the fact that she had survived so long that she was
still transmitting every day. She sent 120 messages during
(45:25):
that time that she was over there.
So she never missed sending a message.
Just super, super impressive. And this lady man, after she got
picked up by the Germans, she tried to escape twice.
They had her in solitary confinement, chained ankles and
wrists for like 10 months because this little 100 LB lady
scared these guys so bad. And and they took her to dock
(45:46):
aisle. They had tortured her.
She didn't give anybody up. And they put the whole weight of
the Nazi war machine on this poor woman and she didn't break.
And the fact that her last word was Libete to me is just like so
impressive, you know? And to think, coming from the
woman who struggled in her exercises and on her mission to
keep her cover and not to freak out, it's pretty impressive that
(46:10):
she didn't give anyone up. Yeah, the end cards continue.
She was in prison for 10 months before being murdered at Dachau.
Nor has been commemorated as Britain's first Muslim war
heroine. She was awarded Britain's George
Cross for refusing to abandon the quote most dangerous post in
France and declining to give up any information to the Nazis.
France honored her bravery with its Quad de Gaia.
(46:31):
And as you said, nor a name of Arabic origin means light.
In real life, Nora in Virginia'stime as active agents in France
did not actually overlap, thoughthey would not have been in
training together. I don't think that they ever met
(46:51):
each other, or at least not thatI could find.
Nora was dropped into France in June of 1943.
She was arrested four months later, and then she was executed
on September 13th the following year.
And Virginia was in France from August 1941 to November 1942, so
before the time that Nora was there.
And then she didn't come back until March 1944, after Nora had
already been arrested. And then she stayed through
(47:14):
until the end of the war. I don't mind the change in this
movie that they had their paths crossed and had them have a
relationship. I mean, I don't think it heard
anything. No, I also don't mind it.
I think it's good for storytelling purposes, except I
feel like people might not look into the real story, maybe
because the rest of it is fairlyaccurate already.
(47:36):
Like you, you got to feel that they're telling true stories in
this movie. But like you said, I don't know
if it really it hurts anyone. I don't think it does.
And it doesn't really hurt your memory either.
I I feel like she would have been friends with pretty much
anybody. She seemed like a friendly
little girl on my side. Keep referring to her as a
little girl, even though she's awoman.
(47:58):
She was like, 30. Yeah.
She was 30 when she was executed.
Yeah. The only thing is that I saw a
review where they were talking about how they were like, well,
obviously Khan's plotline was less interesting because she was
just sitting around like tappingmessages in Morse code.
And I was like, honestly, that'show I know this movie didn't do
her story justice because I listened to this four part
(48:20):
podcast earlier in rapt attention.
Man, it was so interesting. She was constantly almost
getting caught and having to come up with new and creative
ways to transmit her adventure was, I think, overshadowed by
all this stuff that Virginia Hall did in the movie and in
real life. I I think it's much more
interesting than that. I wonder too, if the fact that
(48:42):
the actress who plays Virginia has a producer and a writer's
role, if that affects her part in the story a bit.
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure it does. And I mean, I guess the other
perspective is she could have just written a movie about
Virginia Hall and not included Con at all, you know?
Right, right. I feel like I'm hopeful that
we'll get more movies of the menin Robert here.
(49:05):
I feel like we deserve some and people are dying man.
We need to tell these stories before the people that knew
anything about it are dead. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. And during the period of 1944
and 45, which is the part that doesn't really get covered in
the movie hall, was really instrumental in readying France
for the D-Day landings. Like I said earlier, this woman
(49:27):
was everywhere involved in everything.
And then she was building up anti Nazi fighter groups in the
mountains of Austria right towards the end of the war.
And that's actually where she met her husband, fellow OS US
agent Paul Golio. How romantic.
Just both fighting Nazis, right?Right.
I love doing the research for this.
It's kind of influenced how I feel about the movie at the
(49:49):
Speaking of which, we probably need to rate the movie.
Yeah, we definitely need to ratethe movie.
Should we rate it? Cuthbert's out of 10.
Yes, we definitely. I'm not choosing words that you
(50:11):
find difficult to say on purpose.
Are you sure? Well, maybe a little.
Yeah, it's funny. Anyway, I'll start because I
want to start today. I'm rating this movie, I don't
know, 7 cut birds out of 10. I like it more for the stories
it tells than the way it tells the stories.
(50:32):
So I'm really glad these women, that some lights shine on that,
shine on that. What's the word?
Some like? Some shine, Shine.
Oh. My God, now you're light.
Light Sean on them. Yeah, Sean Pieces.
Sentence I'm really glad that this room is dead in the
(50:56):
spotlight and just wish that they've gotten a slightly better
spotlight. Overall.
It's alright. Like I said, I enjoyed myself
and I enjoyed researching specifically, but I just feel
like it would do much better as Unlimited series or just a movie
focused on one of the three ladies.
So the acting was fine, the storytelling wasn't bad, but it
(51:20):
kind of deserved a little bit more depth and emotion.
There's only a couple scenes that were really emotional, but
I would love to have seen a little bit more motivation in
this. And there's a lot of exposition
through radios and all that sortof stuff, but there's not a lot
of motivations in this. So I would like some work,
please. How about you?
Yeah, I think that all of these women were, I don't want to say
(51:44):
eccentric because that could have a negative connotation.
They were all characters. They were all larger than life
in their own way. They were all just
extraordinary. And I think that you could
definitely devote a movie or like you said, maybe make a
limited series where you devote a lot more time to each of them
and you get to know them as people because they are so
interesting. And I think because that didn't
(52:05):
happen, it did lose some emotional impact.
When I listened to the four partminiseries on newer Con, I cried
at the end. You know, it was just hearing
about this, this woman that the Nazis couldn't break.
She's a children's writer, you know, no one would have expected
it of her. And then in the movie, I just
didn't have the same kind of emotional impact for me.
(52:25):
But I agree, I had a really goodtime researching.
And sometimes with these movies,it's kind of of no fault of
their own, but they get so absorbed in the importance of
telling this story because maybethis is the only movie that gets
made about female spies. You know, we know all about how
much work Kate Winslow had to put in to get the Lee movie made
because this is kind of a genre where there's not a ton of
(52:49):
content out there where there are female leads and female main
characters and female protagonists.
So I think that a lot of the times these movies get caught up
in, you know, the importance of telling the story over the
content of the story itself. So I'm going to say I'll give it
a 6 1/2 out of 10. I don't think it was a bad
movie, but like you said, I think it could have been better.
(53:10):
For me, I think the back half was more interesting than the
first half. It kind of picked up a lot.
There's a lot, a lot more actiony stuff happening, but
yeah, I would have really loved to see a lot more depth and
breadth about these women. I feel like that's the
exposition part they do in the first maybe half hour, 45
minutes. It's all just telling people
(53:31):
lots of stuff instead of showingpeople in the second-half kind
of does a better job at showing you what's going on, so maybe
that's why. Yeah, you're probably right.
That sounds right. Are you reading anything?
(53:52):
Oh shit, what am I reading? Oh wait, did I start any book on
my phone? She's gone to get her entire
stack of books. I mean, how many books are there
in your stack currently? A lot.
We don't have to talk about no. We don't talk about brain.
No, no, no. Well, I bought a book about DF
(54:12):
that got stolen off my porch, soI've ordered a new one, but I
don't have it yet. But rude, right?
Who would steal a $7.00 used book off my porch?
Like if you want to read it thatbad, ask me if you can borrow
it. So I've just got this other new
one, well, new to me, called TheWomen Who Flew for Hitler.
A true story of soaring ambitionand searing rivalry by Claire
Mulley, who also wrote Agent Zoe.
(54:34):
So excited to dig into this one.Did you finish Agents out?
I've not done it yet but I'm I've read like I've half read
like 47 different books recentlyso I will circle back.
I feel like I'm in the same boatslash book all the time.
I keep reading the same. I'm reading three books at the
same time, which is fine. I haven't finished either of
(54:54):
them, but I need to hurry the fuck up.
Yeah, get on it. Thank you, everyone for
listening once again to Rosie the reviewer.
You can share this episode with a friend and you can find us
wherever you get your podcast because I forgot to say just
now. You can also follow us on
Instagram if you like. You're pretty nice.
And what else? You can find more information
(55:18):
like the podcast we listen to and documentary we've seen.
Welcome to Rosie the Reviewer. We're your host.
I'm Sam. And I'm.
And we like World War 2 media, and we want to talk about it.
Welcome back to Rosie the reviewer.
This week we are talking about the movie A Call to Spy, which
came out in 2019. It was directed by Lydia Dean
(00:23):
Pilcher and written and producedby Sarah Megan Thomas, who also
acts in it. And she portrays Virginia Hall.
It's based on the true story of Special Operations executive Spy
Master Vera Atkins and Special Agents Virginia Hall and Noor
Anayat Khan, who were stationed in France during World War 2.
What did you think of this movie?
I have some next feelings about this movie because I'd never
(00:45):
heard of it before and I found it online and I was like, oh
this is cool, this is all about spy ladies.
And I was like, yes, finally. And then I watched the movie and
it's fine. You know, it's just kind of, and
the movie making is kind of average.
It follows more or less 3 storylines and it feels almost
like it should be a limited series, but it's only a movie so
(01:07):
I feel like the stories weren't fully fledged and also there
wasn't a whole lot of depth to it.
But it didn't make me research awhole lot so that's good.
How about you? Yeah, I thought it kind of the
same problem as the Pacific where they're trying to tell
three separate plot lines and maybe they're not doing them
(01:28):
justice. Especially I found the newer
plot line got a bit sidelined infavor of the Virginia plot line.
And they're all super fascinating women and honestly
could probably have their own movie or as you said, their own
mini series. So yeah, I thought it was fine,
like you said. And anytime I see a movie like
this and I'm like, I wonder why I haven't heard of it.
I'm like, I bet there's a reason.
(01:48):
And yeah, it's one of those oneswhere I really wanted it to be
good and it's just, it's fine. It's all right.
I don't like my time back or anything.
And like you said, it did lead me down some fun rabbit holes.
So there is that. I think I might watch it again
just because I did all the research before and then watched
it, but I did a bunch more research afterwards and I just
(02:12):
maybe want to see what they did and didn't do.
And I'll say there's a thing andthen I'll shut up and we can get
into it. But there's something about the
music, like the production valueis pretty high.
Like production design is beautiful and the acting is
fine, but the music feels like very lifetime me to me.
(02:33):
Why? But it does.
Yeah, yeah, I'll buy that for sure.
All right, let's get into the plot.
We've got some opening cards. France falls to the Nazis.
Britain stands alone. Winston Churchill hastily
(02:55):
creates a spy agency to disrupt the Nazi war machine.
Its mission in France place spies everywhere to build
resistance and conduct sabotage.But there are no experienced
spies. For this new type of warfare, a
call must go out to amateurs. The first few are dropped behind
enemy lines to begin a secret war inspired by true stories.
It's a long opening card for sure and the font is rare in
(03:19):
this. Looks like it was done by my 15
year old cousin. Sometimes I find the opening and
closing cards we get in these movies are not strictly
necessary because you're about to find out the same information
in the movie. I don't know that this provided
necessarily contacts that we couldn't have picked up on in
(03:39):
the first few scenes, but I mean, it was there so I guess it
doesn't hurt. Yeah, I feel like you're right.
They do a whole lot of exposition to in the 1st 15
minutes of the movie and most ofit's in there, so you're right.
But I mean it is a World War 2 movie and they usually have
opening cards, so maybe it's just a trope that can't be
(04:01):
untrouped. How do I get hired to write the
opening and closing cards for World War 2 movies?
Yeah. So the movie starts in earnest.
We see it is August 1941. American ASRI agent Virginia
Hall, played by Sarah Megan Thomas, is being tortured by
German officers but won't revealher real name.
(04:21):
She calls herself Virgin Virginia Hall was pretty
legendary. She was infamous amongst the
Germans who called the limping lady will seek her out.
Why? In a minute.
And the most dangers of all Allied agents.
I do wonder why, but she was thefirst female agent to operate in
Vichy France and she worked across Europe and various
(04:43):
American embassies throughout the 1930s.
And she also volunteered as an ambulance driver for the French
Army prior to the fall of Francein 1940.
So she got around. Yeah, I think because it's
trying to tell so many plot lines this movie doesn't
necessarily give her. I read a biography of her called
A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Pernell a couple of years
(05:04):
ago, and it's really hard to express how much she was really
the crux around which a huge amount of Allied intelligence
rotated on the continent. This woman had her fingers in so
many pies. She was involved in so many
projects on the ground. She organized fighter groups.
Right at the end of the war, shewas in the Austrian mountains
(05:25):
organizing resistance groups against the Germans.
She was heavily involved and at one point in the war she was
actually the most wanted Allied agent.
The Germans were dying to catch her.
Yeah, What made me laugh when I read about her was obviously
they call her the Linton Lady. She has a prosthetic leg and she
lives. But later she dressed up as an
(05:46):
old woman, has her disguise so they wouldn't suspect her as
much and just it's so smart. Yeah, she would literally go up
to the Germans disguise as an old woman and sell them cheese
that she had made. And she would use that
opportunity to eavesdrop on their conversations.
This woman was fearless. She would do anything.
How easy would it have been for her to just be caught in that
(06:07):
moment? She's always so close.
Yeah, it's wild. The book really takes you
through. She just spent such a long
period of time and she was neversafe.
She was always on the move. Even when she was putting her
head down at night in a place where she knew the people and
she should have been safe. She knew that she might have to
get up in the night and move. She couldn't stay in one place
(06:29):
because the Germans would catch her and it just seems like such
an immensely stressful life and she just took to it like a duck
to water. Yeah.
I wonder, I don't know if you remember from the book, but do
we know specifically why she joined?
Yes, we. Well, she wanted to be a
diplomat. That was her whole thing.
That was her lifetime dream. And she applied three or four
(06:50):
times, I think, to the diplomatic service.
And she kept getting rejected. And she worked in several
embassies across Europe. And then when she got pretty
much as it happens in the movie,she was approached at a party by
Vera Atkins. And Vera was like, do you want
to actually put your skills to good use and be taken seriously?
And she was really interested inthat.
I do like the, I guess we're kind of getting ahead of
(07:11):
ourselves a little, but I do like the little letter we see
her write about how just becauseshe has a disability doesn't
mean she can't be useful. And I felt that.
Yeah, she genuinely did write toFDR as well.
This woman was she's not afraid to go over someone's head.
She's like me. I just write him to all the
actors. Yeah, exactly.
(07:32):
Well, flashback to three months earlier at the SOEHQF section in
London, the leader of the Frenchsection of the SOE, his name is
Maurice Buckmaster. He's played by Linus Roach.
He's meeting with his right handpeople to discuss the difficulty
in keeping radio operators alive.
It's a super, super dangerous job.
Basically, what they would do isyou'd have an entire circuit of
(07:54):
agents operating in France, collaborating with the
resistance and what you might have one radio operator or two.
And the problem is that the Germans were getting really,
really good at tracking down thesignal of these radio operators.
And so they could find you within 20 minutes.
So if you're trying to transmit information from your circuit
back to London, you had to tap out this message and then you
(08:16):
had to get the fuck out of there.
And they had these aerials that they had to put out because this
is the technology of the time, right, These big transmitters.
And they would have to to try and disguise them with clothes
lines or disguise them in a tree.
But it's like a 70 foot aerial that you have to hide.
And they reached a point where it was so dangerous.
The Germans were getting so goodat finding them that they were
like, OK, well, we're not going to transmit where we sleep
(08:37):
anymore. So that means you have to go out
into a park or a public place and find somewhere to hide your
aerial transmit and then fuck off.
And you can't use the same placetwice.
And so these people had crazy, crazy dangerous jobs.
They were constantly getting picked up by the Germans and
disappeared. So that's kind of where they're
at right now in a lot of they'rehaving difficulty maintaining
connections with their circuits because they can't keep radio
(08:59):
operators alive. And we get introduced to Vera
Atkins, played by Stana Katic. She's one of our main
characters, and she gets assigned to recruit women to
their cause. Women are obviously going to be
a little bit more inconspicuous,more likely to be underestimated
perhaps. And there was also a sense, I
think, that women, especially atthe time and the way they move
(09:21):
through the world, had to be a bit more observant, had to be a
bit more aware of danger or how they were coming off to other
people or how to smooth things over, how not to make waves.
So they, a lot of people did seethe value in having female
agents. So she's sent out to recruit
female agents. And one of the other agents said
to her, make sure they're pretty.
Yeah, this line, man, I, I don'tknow, I really like minus Roach
(09:46):
as Maurice Burgmaster. I thought he was fantastic in
this. It's nice to see kind of a man
take a back seat to his 2nd and taken with Christ instead of
just being offended all the timeby it.
So I did kind of like it. But you're right, a woman were
unrespected even by Maurice Bugmaster at the beginning.
He was like, I don't know, but let's try.
(10:08):
We have no interruptions. So I don't know.
I did really like this part obviously, because we've seen
very before. She's also portrayed in colorful
name with pride where she servedas a recruiter and mentor, a
friend of the pod. Do you like Sambo?
So that was really cool and real.
They were actually consultants on the movie and I did not know
(10:29):
this. Pretty cool.
Vera was a cool lady. She was a multilingual Jewish
Romanian woman who was recruitedbefore the war by Canadian
spymaster Sir William Stevenson and he was actually the
inspiration for James Bond. And if we talk about X Company
in a few episodes, we'll talk more about him as well, because
he was also the founder of Camp X in Ontario that trained a lot
(10:51):
of these agents or kind of in their initial training stage.
And he recruited her to do Reconin Europe before the war about
the rising fascist threat. She joined the SOE in 1941 and
she became indispensable to Colonel Buckmaster,
unfortunately, because she was aforeigner, because she was
Jewish, because she was a woman,her progress through the agency
(11:11):
was really Hanford. She was the right hand man in
all respects of Colonel Buckmaster, but she had a really
hard time getting promoted on paper, getting paid more,
getting an actual promotion rather than just having all this
work piled on her. But she was still an assistant
kind of thing. They show it in the movie, too.
She wants her papers, she wants to be British, and they keep
(11:34):
denying her appeal for that. And they do show it in the movie
quite a bit, but again, they do so because they're trying to do
so many things at once. None of it's really all that
convincing to me, which is a shame because you can tell that
they really tried, but they maybe tried a little bit too
much. For sure it's too much.
(11:54):
No, I agree. So next we get the bit we were
talking about briefly before. Virginia is working away in our
embassy job but she's been rejected many times and she
meets Vera at the party and soonVera recruits her and nor any
outcome played by Radhika FT as he already operates her.
So this party I thought was kindof strange.
(12:17):
They make it pretty clear that Jews aren't necessarily popular
in Britain either. They have a little mention of
and that makes if you are very uncomfortable and she moves
around, meets Virginia who then later apologizes for being weird
at the party. And I didn't really see that in
the movie, so I was really quiteconfused about that.
(12:38):
One of the things, you know, they obviously tried to write
sort of a interweaving plot linefor Khan and Hall in this movie.
But one of the things I would have liked to see a bit more of
was Paul having worked as a ambulance driver before the fall
of France in 1940. She had seen a lot of the
terrible shit the Nazis were doing.
(13:00):
You know, she had been right there in the teeth of the German
advanced. And Khan, before her family fled
from France, had seen the same thing.
They'd had to evacuate Paris. She had seen bodies laying face
down next to the road. And so both of these women were
haunted by what they had seen ofthe German war machine.
And that is part of what inspired them to get involved
(13:22):
with this. So it would have been cool to
kind of see that a bit more as they developed their
camaraderie. Yeah, and this is the first time
the movie deviates from the actual industry because Noor and
Virginia weren't at the history at the same time, because Noor
didn't join until 1943. But she was a part of the
(13:43):
Women's Auxiliary Air Force, where she trained as a radio
operator, and she was ultimatelythe first female radio operator
sent into. And this lady was so strange and
eccentric and interesting. And we watched documentaries and
listened to podcasts and she's just so interesting.
Yeah, there is a podcast called the Spy Who and they have a four
(14:05):
part series on Noor in a yacht con and it's so interesting.
Y'all. You should definitely listen to
it. She was a person who wrote
stories for children. Like, she had published some,
like, children's books. And yeah, she was raised as a
pacifist, and she wanted to get involved in the war in a way
that didn't involve killing. She had initially planned on
being a nurse, but she thought that wouldn't be enough.
(14:27):
And reading a lot of the reportson her, she was afraid of firing
a weapon. A lot of people had
misconceptions about sending herover there.
And then when she went over, sheperformed super well.
But she made mistakes where, youknow, because she wasn't fully
trained, she may not have made those mistakes if she had more
experience. And ultimately a lot of these
(14:48):
factors got her killed. So her story is really sad, but
she's such an interesting person.
I don't know if this this isn't a podcast because you listen to
the podcast and I watch documentary, but during her
training, her final sign off came from Leo Marx.
And he apparently had to kind ofadjust the way he taught her how
(15:08):
to code because she didn't get it at 1st.
And he was like, because she wasalso the woman who didn't lie.
So she never lied. She didn't want to lie to the he
was like, all right, but he can't lie about the codes
either, so they need to be real.And I thought this was so clever
from Neo Marx. He's only 22.
(15:29):
At the time, I didn't even know how to make my own dinner at 22
or so. Leo Marx was the code master at
the SOE who also trained Violat Sabo, and yeah, clearly a guy
who really knew what he was doing.
He'll surface a bit later in themovie as well, but I guess we'll
get to that. So there's a training montage.
Virginia and Noor become friends.
The torture scene that we saw atthe beginning is revealed to be
(15:52):
from Virginia's final Test to complete her training.
So it wasn't real. They're just putting them
through this thing. Apparently in real life, Noor
went through that as well. They dragged her into a room and
they were like, who are you working for?
Blah, blah, blah, you know, in the dead of night kind of thing.
Drag you out of bed. So yeah, the training wasn't any
joke. And the women got the same
training as the men, same hand to hand combat stuff, same
(16:13):
everything, virtually because they had to be able to survive
in the same way that the men would have to survive in this
completely hostile environment where everyone is getting for
you. Yeah.
And we also see a little bit of nervous hesitation in this scene
because she sees everybody else fighting and killing, and she's
the one reading a book, not touching a weapon.
(16:34):
So that's a little nod to her pacifism.
So the word. Is that the word?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Virginia, meanwhile, wants to be
a badass. Apparently she put lipstick on
this knife, and when they were doing fake killing, they had to
go up behind a dummy and slash its throat.
She slashed it with this knife that she had put lipstick all
over so it looked like it was bleeding.
I'm like, OK, that's fucking intense, Virginia.
(16:56):
So Virginia does all this with her presented like Cuthbert.
I can't even pronounce the word Cuthbert.
It's so hard to pronounce, but just imagine just naming your
leg. Yeah, she was in a hunting
accident and she got gangrene, so she had a wooden leg, which
was why the Germans called her the Limping Lady.
And Despite that, despite her very obvious and familiar walk,
(17:20):
they never caught her so. By that, yeah, finally they get
sent into action in Lyon, September 1941.
It is Virginia who gets her first.
She arrives in Bushi, France andmakes her contact.
Doctor Shaban, played by Rusty Sutherland, VA, hits a gun
(17:40):
running as expected from her organizing rescue for an inter
colleague during Recon and recruiting other resistant
members. And this was true too.
For all I'm complaining about the movie, The movie does a
pretty good job at getting most of the deal.
Right for sure. And also may I mention Rossif
Sutherland is the son of famous actor Donald Sutherland and the
(18:02):
half brother of Kiefer Sutherland.
How did I not know this? I know this guy sooner and other
things but I did not know this. Well, I mean, I'm Canadian and
we know everyone who is Canadian, so.
Ask him to be in the broadcast owners you know.
Yeah, well, there's only 12 of us up here, you see, So we do
all know each other. That's how I know.
(18:23):
Yeah. Lyon was a major center of
French resistance in World War 2.
They paid a heavy price. When the Allies landed, many of
the captured resistance members were executed en masked by the
Germans to kind of set an example.
And the resistance actually tookover this nearby village called
Viet Ban for three days in late August 1944.
Like just imagine these are civilians and they take over
(18:46):
this whole area from the Nazis and then Leo itself ended up
being liberated by the allies onSeptember 3rd.
So the network in Leo was calledProsper.
I believe it was one of the biggest, if not the biggest
networks in France. So it's huge.
New York is about to be sent to France.
They're in a situation where their last radio operator has
(19:09):
been killed and they don't have a way to get information from
their resistance circuits. And so they're like, we need to
send someone in and nobody is really prepared.
But newer is sort of less unprepared than everyone else.
And a lot of people have reservations about sending her
in, but Vera really believes in her.
So she's about to be sent in. She's not fully trained.
And she gets there and immediately police search her
(19:32):
initial safe house and she makesa narrow escape.
So action-packed straight away. And it's similar to what
happened in real life. She met her contacts and her
contacts. Super jealous girlfriend, which
tie a ribbon around that becauseit's relevant later.
So she meets her contact, the contact's jealous girlfriend
named Renee. And then she meets up with this
(19:52):
other guy who's a radio operator, kind of like outside
of town. She's supposed to be operating
in Paris, they think, and he's like out in the stick somewhere.
But her radio hasn't landed yet.So she has to go and make
contact with this guy. And then literally it's like her
first or second day and some guycomes running up and he's like,
you got to go. The Gestapo arrested the guy you
just met and they're coming here.
(20:13):
So she has to like, bury the aerial in the ground.
So it can't be found and then fuck off out of there.
And and she she doesn't know if her contact is burned.
She doesn't know if these peoplethat she's met have been
compromised. It's a whole thing.
It sounds super intense. I don't know how I would respond
to it, but yeah. And I feel like Nora was a very
good radio operator, but she wasn't too aware of stuff going
(20:38):
on around her. If you read her like training
reports, and they all seem to think she's not not too smart.
Like she's really good of this job, but not social awareness or
people. She's got kind of a different
kind of wiring almost. Yeah, I think deeply naive might
be one way to put it. There's a bit in the podcast
(20:58):
where they talk about how when she first meets her contact in
Paris, they told her it was going to be an old lady.
And she shows up at the apartment with flowers and she's
already, and she's rehearsed hercode message, She's ready to go.
And then the person who opens the door is not an old lady, but
a young man. And she completely forgets what
she supposed to say. She's like, oh, I think you're
expecting me. And he's like, I don't know, am
(21:19):
I expecting you? And then basically, because she
looks scared shitless, he made her come inside.
And then gradually they established that he was, in
fact, the right guy that she wassupposed to meet.
But imagine if he had been a collaborator with the Nazis or
just some guy like. Yeah, it's, I just found her so
interesting. I just, I want to go and listen
to the podcast. I feel like I'd eat that up.
(21:41):
You should. That's really interesting.
So we need more new people. We meet a lot of people in this
movie. We meet Father Robert Alesh,
played by Joe Doyle, and he alsoseeks out Doctor Shiva for
protection since he is a well known anti fastest printer in
France and Virginia. Who's with Doctor Shiva still?
(22:02):
They're kind of friendly at thispoint.
I'm working together. She's immediately suspicious of
him, but she's overruled by London because London checks up
on this guy and says, yeah, he'slegit, he's OK, you can trust
him. Yeah, so Alesh was a Catholic
priest who pretended to be an anti fascist because he saw the
(22:23):
opportunity to make money by infiltrating all these anti
fascist rings and working for the Germans.
So he would basically encourage and foment resistance activities
and then turn in the perpetrators.
Like when cops set up a sting operation where they basically
make the criminal do it and thenturn them in.
He became an advair agent working directly for the
Germans. He infiltrated the French
Resistance Gloria network in Paris, which as a result was and
(22:46):
afterward, he made contact with Virginia Hall, claiming to be an
agent of Gloria and being like, oh, I have all this intelligence
for you. So crazy.
I'm the only one who survived. And she was like, that seems to
us. But like you said, she got
overruled and many members of her network were captured and
killed based on information thatFather Alesh passed to the
Germans. And he ultimately was executed
(23:07):
by firing squad for his crimes in 1949.
Took a while though. I wonder how many people died
because of him. Yeah, a lot.
I feel like that's just similar what we've read about the
comment line. It happened all the time.
The Malaysians were written everywhere.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, the US gets involved in
the war. And up until this point,
(23:27):
Virginia has been using more or less her real identity.
She's been going around and pretending to be a reporter.
And now that the US is involved in the war, obviously Americans
are not going to be chill anymore.
So she has to go deeper undercover and kind of switch up
what she's been doing. Newer moves on to Paris to take
up an even riskier post. So there's a good chunk of time
where she is the only active radio operator in Paris.
(23:50):
And meanwhile, back in England, Vera discovers that she's not
going to get her citizenship paper.
So as you said, this is kind of Vera's subplot.
She is sort of criminally underrated by all of her
colleagues and the people aroundher.
I was going to say that she's got to fight for her right to
party, but it's not to party, it's to be taken just the least
bit seriously. Yeah, right.
(24:12):
Also, I love nurse cover storiesthat she's a children's a
kindergarten teacher. I feel like that's so fitting to
who she was. Well, she studied child
psychology at the Sorbonne, I believe, before the war.
Oh, that makes sense. And you explained to me I
somehow didn't pick up on this, but cover stories and names are
(24:33):
usually as close to your life aspossible, so you don't have to
lie as much. So you can't as easily get
caught in a lie. And it makes sense, actually.
Yeah, you've put in a little funny note here.
It's just Virginia does leader is shut like she she goes full
on SAS work heroes and does somereal life sabotage and helps her
(24:54):
assistance guy escape from jail and she set up a bunch of sad
houses. So in the movie we only get to
see maybe one operation where she does a little real life
sabotage. But in real life she did many of
these things all of the time. I feel like she took so many
risks that other people wouldn'thave taken.
Oh, yeah, She's straight up getting people out of jail.
(25:17):
She's organizing weapons drops. She's organizing this resistance
cell. And that resistance cell, like
this woman is involved in literally everything.
And she is not afraid of, you know, doing super dangerous
shit. The whole thing where she's
getting someone to smuggle things into the prison so these
guys can escape. And then she sets up the safe
house for them after. You just arrive in France, a
(25:39):
country in which you do not liveand you're not maybe super
familiar with, and you're like, yeah, I can do this task that
requires an intimate knowledge of the locale.
I had heard of Virginia before because of the book you
mentioned, but before that therewasn't a whole lot known about
her because she wasn't a lady who would like to talk about her
excellence. So for a long time people didn't
(26:01):
know that she was this amazing woman, which is probably why
there aren't any other movies about her yet.
There's one in the pipeline somewhere that we're hoping
that's made someday. So there's hoping.
Yeah, I think a lot of these guys after the OR took their vow
of secrecy really seriously. And so we're finding out in the
(26:21):
past few years, a lot of super old ladies who die, and then it
turns out that they were in the SOE and they never told anybody.
Yeah, of course SOE files were restricted for long, long time.
But men are more likely to tell than women.
Maybe women are just better at keeping secrets.
Maybe that's why they make such good spies.
(26:41):
I also just think that nobody would have asked them, right?
Like nobody, you're probably You're not asking your grandma
what she did during the war, right?
No, you do not ask your grandpa and you moved your grandma
because you just assumed that your grandma was at home taking
care of the kids. Yeah, I think after the war to a
lot of these women got railroaded out of continuing in
(27:03):
this line of work. I mean, we see it, it happened
to Virginia and it happened to alot of the women involved where
it was like, Oh, well, there's no place for you in a post war
CIA or whatever the case may be,right?
Yeah, that's true. I mean, they were still women in
a time where women did not have it easy.
But some of them didn't let thatstop them.
(27:23):
And these women are all prime examples of that.
So I'm still really glad this movie's out there.
For sure. So we're still in the own It's
November of 1942 at this point. If you'll recall from our SAS
Real Heroes episodes, November of 1942 was Operation Torch.
The Allies are invading North Africa, and when Germany loses
(27:44):
control of French North Africa, that's when they decide we're
going to get rid of all pretenseof there being this independent
French government, and we're going to occupy the rest of
France. And obviously, the Germans
tightening their grip on France is not good news for our SOE
agents. We see that Father Alesh is in
fact working for the Nazis, including Klaus Barbie, who was
(28:05):
known as the Butcher of Lyon, played by Mark Grisman in this
movie. And Noor knows that she's in
grave danger but refuses to fleeto safety.
And at this point, a lot of Noor's compatriots and picked up
by the Gestapo, they knew that she was a woman of Indian
descent. They knew her code name
Madeleine. They knew a ton of information
(28:27):
about her. And they also had some of her
friends in custody. And one of them, they got him
basically at gunpoint to call her and be like, come meet me in
this park. And she luckily knew that it was
a trap, but the walls were closing in on her effectively.
And the SOA decided at that point, like, we have to get her
out of there. And she's like, I'm not going,
(28:48):
I'm going to stay because I'm the only radio operator in
Paris, and someone has to do it.Yeah.
And they didn't just tell her once, right?
It was a couple times that she just refused to evacuate.
And I feel like part of that is being really brave, and part of
that is taking responsibility. But the other part is, like you
said, maybe a bit of naivete. Yeah, for her, she just didn't
(29:11):
want to leave until there was someone else who could do what
she could do. So she's like, well you better
finish training them and send someone new over.
If not until you do, I'm staying.
You know this. Her job was so important. close
Barbie, head of the Gestapo in Lyon.
He was known for personally torturing prisoners which is why
they called him the butcher of Lyon.
And then after the war he assisted the US with anti
(29:32):
communist activities and they helped him escape to South
America where he advised the dictatorial regime in Bolivia on
repressing opposition and probably assisted in a military
coup in 1980. So he lived a nice long free
life. Thank you USA.
And then he was eventually caught and convicted of war
crimes and crimes against humanity, and he died in prison
in 1991. You can't see this podcast, but
(29:54):
I'm just leaning my head on a microphone being really
disappointed with America right now.
Yeah, the US government actuallyapologized in the 80s for
helping him get away and escaping justice.
Well, that didn't say if anybodydid it.
No, it really didn't. And it didn't prevent Claus
Barbie, a terrible person, from living a long and fruitful life
(30:15):
where he helped more people get hurt in South America.
All right, now we've done that. Virginia is known to the Gestapo
and they are looking for her. As we said, they find her very
dangerous and they want to catchher really badly.
Doctor Chaffet is arrested. This made me I said one of her
other compatriot is shot practically in front of her.
(30:37):
The scene was awful but she has to act like she doesn't know him
so she works faster. In the movie as he's on his
knees surrounded by German officers or s s officers
specifically, it just is to keepgoing as he can't stop and it's
so bad. But then thankfully, when she's
trying to get out, she gets to buy a train ticket and there's a
(31:00):
train ticket guy in the booth and he's watching her and is
looking at this little hit list of people that they're looking
for. And he sees her and he collects
her and he looks at her. And then all he says is Bunker
Raj. It's the best part of the entire
region. I agree with you.
That's your night, but I agree. Yeah, I love the small everyday
(31:21):
acts of resistance and courage from people.
I mean, that always gets me. Makes you wonder how many other
people he's said the same. Thank you while looking at this
little hit list. Yeah, I don't think was a real
person, but Virginia did have three men I think that she
worked with quite a lot in France that she called her
nephews sort of jokingly. And if I'm not mistaken, all
(31:44):
three of them were captured and killed by the Germans.
And she did spend a lot of time trying to get them out and
couldn't. It's so tough, man.
I don't understand how in general like resistance.
And as we got people out of jailso often, I mean, more often
they failed. But the thieves, they, they had
to get them out. They're pretty risky, risking
(32:05):
the lives of many people to get one person back out.
It's a pretty scary operation todo.
But I mean, because the resistance was getting caught
and infiltrated by the Germans so often, they just really
couldn't afford to not do that. I think there's a bit in the
podcast where they're talking about how newer at one point is
(32:28):
basically one of the very few people left in a circuit, and
she's trying to recruit new members of the resistance based
on people that she knew growing up because she grew up in
France. Imagine you're having to try and
recruit other spies on the fly based on people you haven't
spoken to in like 15 years. Yeah, Noor gets snitched on and
arrested. And earlier when I said put a
(32:50):
ribbon around jealous Renee, thegirlfriend of Nora's first
resistance contact in Paris. Well, Renee didn't like Noor.
And now I think maybe she was a little jealous of Nora around
her boyfriend. And she contacted the Nazis and
was like, I can give you this lady you're looking for in
exchange for 100,000 francs, which sounds like a lot of
(33:11):
money, but it's really like, buya few new nice dresses money.
It's not even that much money. It's not 30 pieces of silver.
It's just like giving someone 500 bucks.
And the Nazis were like, oh, yeah, yeah, no problem.
You can have your 100,000 francs.
You sure drive a hard bargain. And yeah, because of this woman
and Noor gets arrested. And it's, gosh, it's awful
(33:32):
because because of her incomplete training, she
misunderstood this thing that they had told her about filing
all of your codes. And she thought that she was
supposed to write them down. So she had this notebook full of
codes that had a lot of incriminating information in it.
And she was on her last day in France.
The. SO we were going to fly her out.
She only had to make it uncaptured for one more day.
(33:54):
The Gestapo we're closing in. But she could have just hit out
somewhere and kept her head. But she knew that that book of
codes that could get a lot of people killed was in her
apartment. So she was like, well, I gotta
risk it. So she went back to her
apartment, and that's when she got caught.
Jesus. Yeah.
Once she gets caught, the Germans have her radio and all
of her codes. So now they can transmit as her
(34:17):
back to London. And Leo Marks, played by
Alistair Brammer, suspects that the Germans are transmitting
using her code, but he gets overruled.
So what had happened was before the war, before she went, not
before the war, but before she went into France, he was like,
if you ever transmit to me a sentence of exactly 18
characters, I will know that youare compromised.
(34:38):
And she's like, OK, I will neversend you a sentence with 18
characters in it, like, ever. So he gets this transmission
from, quote UN quote, newer, andthere's a sentence in it that's
18 characters. And he's like, I know that's not
her. She wouldn't do that.
And everyone else is like, yeah,but remember how she used to
make all those mistakes in training?
And he's like, she would not make this mistake.
And they were like, it's probably fine, like we'll keep
(35:00):
an eye on it, but it's probably OK.
So months go by where they're getting these transmissions
from, quote UN quote, Noor, and they're starting to trust her
again. They send in all these new
agents that parachute in and they get delivered right into
the arms of the Gestapo, of course.
And that's when they know for sure that Noor has been captured
and she's going to be disappeared.
(35:21):
So the Germans had this thing called Noxu Nebel, which means
night and fog, and it was a directive issued by Adolf Hitler
on the 7th of December 1941. Basically, whenever the Gestapo
picked up political activists, members of the resistance, that
kind of stuff, they would disappear them.
And their idea was that they didn't want your family and
(35:42):
friends to know what happened toyou because that creates this
atmosphere of fear and not knowing, and that would make
people be less likely to act outagainst the regime.
And also the other would be thatif they didn't know what had
happened to you, they could evenmisuse your identity like they
did with nor. So that's the other one.
And I'll I'll give you the full German pronunciation just for
(36:05):
fun. It's not UN neighbor.
There you go, and it's pretty. Horrible.
Like it's such a almost poetic way of being very evil.
Yeah, and unfortunately part of the reason why Noor got caught
in the 1st place was because of the same kind of thing.
There was 2 Canadian agents thatgot picked up and and these two
French agents managed to escape.They had the radio in the back
(36:28):
of their car and they're like weneed to destroy this radio so
that the Germans can't radio back to London pretending to be
these two Canadians that they caught.
So the one guy drove the car as hard as he could into a barrier
to try and blow it up. Unfortunately the car was not
destroyed. The Germans were able to
retrieve the radio they were transmitting back to London as
these two Canadians. London was none the wiser.
(36:49):
And so it was these quote UN quote 2 Canadians who were like,
oh, send a newer to this this place at this time, you know, do
this and that sure parachute people here.
And so part of the reason why Nora got caught was this exact
same kind of thing had happened to some other agents.
It's no. Horrible, but a slight deviation
I think from real life in the movie with Nora is that it's not
(37:11):
her female friend that that's right, it's her boyfriend who
does it. So I wonder why they changed
that. Yeah, I don't know.
Maybe they didn't want to like be like, I don't know, not
support or something because thegirlfriend or the friend is
actually like, she feels sorry as soon as it happens, but yeah.
(37:31):
Yeah, I mean, that friend is a different person from Renee.
They're not the same person. No, right.
But they could have used that story, right?
Yeah, I mean, Noor did have, like I said, she did have lots
of friends in Paris from when she had lived there, and she did
periodically make contact with those people, but she wouldn't
have stayed with them because she knew that it was super,
(37:52):
super dangerous. Like if she got caught everyone
would get shot. Yeah, so meanwhile, Virginia
also still has to get the fuck out of Dodge and she hikes to
safety via the gurneys, which isa hellish journey.
And also, she's got a so good luck on that.
Her entire circuit had been compromised at this point.
And I saw you won't send her back into action.
(38:14):
So she needs to get a job with the RSS instead.
But first she has to make it back.
And it's a tough journey. And I was actually a funny
little anecdote here to deal with her leg cut first because
she was tracking over the Pyrenees kind of having a hard
time and she radioed the SRE andwe're saying cut the bird is
(38:35):
different trouble. So as we didn't realize that she
had named her like that, they thought she meant an actual
person. So they replied that is
constipered from being problematic.
She should probably have him eliminated.
Funny, I'm sure she got a kick out of that.
I'm sure. Gira finally gets her papers.
(38:57):
It's 1944 at this point, I think, though she does get
thoroughly razzed for not predicting that Father Alesh
would sell them out, because I believe she was the one who sort
of checked into his background. She and Virginia, who is now
back, must go tell Noor's motherof her death.
And it's man. Like I just cannot overstate how
much of A bummer this scene is. They go tell this poor woman
(39:18):
that her daughter has died and they're outside of the house and
this lady closes the door and all of a sudden she just lets
out this like guttural, heart wrenching scream because her
child is dead. And it's brutal.
And then we see Nord's death play out.
We see her executed in Dachau concentration camp.
And we also hear her final wordsas they were recorded.
(39:41):
Or it's not sure that she said this, but that I know word was
liberty, so freedom. Yeah, the Nazi who killed her
passed that story along, so that's charming.
Nice, I think nice very sarcastically guys, I don't
everything can Nazi is nice. Yeah, yeah.
And there's a there's a quote from the Persian poet Rumi that
(40:02):
gets repeated throughout the movie.
Noor's mother, I think, says it to her at one point.
She says it to Virginia. And then when Virginia goes to
see Noor's mother after her death, she repeats it back to
her. And it's don't you know yet?
It's your light that lights the world and that just made me very
sad. And Norah's name, Norah's first
name and her full name. I think it's Nor Anissa or
(40:25):
something Means light among women.
So that's literally a reference to that.
So while Dale Donovan, played byMatt Salinger, has a little
cameo and he tells Brad that they're sending Virginia back
into the field with the new radio operator training.
So she's joined the OSS. So she gets to be an agent
(40:45):
again, just not for the SRE. Yeah, they've gone to school on
the British a little bit. Obviously, this was a totally
new kind of warfare. And so the British had learned a
lot through trial and error, which unfortunately was very
costly in the price of human life.
And so they sort of changed the way they were doing things where
they were gonna have much smaller cells of three people
and they would have a radio operator in each cell so they
(41:07):
wouldn't be so reliant on this one person who is so easy for
the Germans to catch. Yeah, did we see Rob, Bill
Donovan and the catcher was a spy.
He wasn't the catcher as a spy yet.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought so.
I just couldn't remember. Yeah.
And we get some super long end cards.
After returning to France, Virginia Hall helped organize an
(41:28):
armed 3 resistance battalions and reported on the enemy by
wireless. Klaus Barbie never caught her.
Virginia's betrayer father Aleshwas executed by the French.
Cited for her rare courage. Virginia was the only civilian
woman awarded the US Distinguished Service Cross in
World War 2. Cuthbert.
Her prosthesis is memorial, I realized on a Congressional Gold
Medal. After the war, Virginia tried
(41:49):
again to become a diplomat. She was rejected.
Later, she became the first female agent for a new spy
organization, the CIA. Yeah, wow.
She didn't have a very good timeat the CIA though, right?
It wasn't easy for her being on the CIA.
Yeah, she worked there until sheretired.
They ended up naming a training facility after her in 20
seventeens, the Virginia Hall Expeditionary Center.
(42:10):
But it really took a long time for her to get recognition, and
her colleagues even acknowledgedthat she was often overlooked
for promotion and recognition because she had such a
significant amount of experienceand skill set that her superiors
didn't have. They were intimidated by her.
A lot of the men that she workedwith didn't want to take her
seriously because they knew thatshe knew more than them.
(42:33):
You're smarter than us. We don't like you or not.
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, right.
Yeah. Is this still the end card?
Oh yeah. My God, it's long.
I've already forgotten how long.So the second part of the end
card has to do with Vera Atkins.Vera Atkins was honored by the
British and the French. This was a section head, Colonel
(42:54):
Buckmaster. By D-Day, hundreds of their
spies, working with the Resistance and the Allies, were
running missions centered by thelarge number of spies missing at
war's end. Vera spearheaded an
investigation into her food. She visited concentration camps,
interrogated Nazi officials and participated in war crime
(43:15):
prosecutions, Farrah confirmed. All but one had died, she said.
I could not just abandoned theirmemory as sexist.
War contributions came at a devastating cost.
About one in three agents sent to France died, including 13 of
various 39 female agents. That number man is so harsh.
(43:36):
Yeah, there is some thought thatshe may have been so invested in
doing these investigations afterthe war out of a sense of guilt
because is there was an inquiry,right?
They said that her and Buckmaster should have known
that a lot of these circuits were compromised.
They should not have kept sending new agents in when they
didn't know what had happened tothe last ones.
And I think there's sort of a, you know, there's a fine line to
(43:59):
be walked between. They're in a wartime situation.
They're making decisions on the fly based on very little
information. And then at the same time, you
know, maybe they were a little reckless.
And so, though she never admitted to you making any
mistakes, you can tell from her actions that she probably felt a
little responsible. Yeah, I read a little article
(44:19):
about her saying that she went to Athensbrook and interrogated
one of the executioners who helped identify Viola Teva for
one, and the three or two other agents also executed at the same
time. But this lady, she was
determined to just get every single answer that was out
(44:42):
there. It just makes me wonder what
happened to the that she couldn't find.
There was only one. Noor Eniac Khan was captured
less than four months after she arrived in France.
And I've quit here. I think the way they word this
under cells that a little bit, Ithink that really rather than
capture less than four months after she arrived in France,
which doesn't sound that impressive, it's She evaded
(45:05):
capture for more than three months at a time when the
Germans were getting better and better at detecting
transmissions. And the lifespan for an
undercover radio operator was six weeks.
And even her colleagues back in London were suitably impressed
by the fact that she had survived so long that she was
still transmitting every day. She sent 120 messages during
(45:25):
that time that she was over there.
So she never missed sending a message.
Just super, super impressive. And this lady man, after she got
picked up by the Germans, she tried to escape twice.
They had her in solitary confinement, chained ankles and
wrists for like 10 months because this little 100 LB lady
scared these guys so bad. And and they took her to dock
(45:46):
aisle. They had tortured her.
She didn't give anybody up. And they put the whole weight of
the Nazi war machine on this poor woman and she didn't break.
And the fact that her last word was Libete to me is just like so
impressive, you know? And to think, coming from the
woman who struggled in her exercises and on her mission to
keep her cover and not to freak out, it's pretty impressive that
(46:10):
she didn't give anyone up. Yeah, the end cards continue.
She was in prison for 10 months before being murdered at Dachau.
Nor has been commemorated as Britain's first Muslim war
heroine. She was awarded Britain's George
Cross for refusing to abandon the quote most dangerous post in
France and declining to give up any information to the Nazis.
France honored her bravery with its Quad de Gaia.
(46:31):
And as you said, nor a name of Arabic origin means light.
In real life, Nora in Virginia'stime as active agents in France
did not actually overlap, thoughthey would not have been in
training together. I don't think that they ever met
(46:51):
each other, or at least not thatI could find.
Nora was dropped into France in June of 1943.
She was arrested four months later, and then she was executed
on September 13th the following year.
And Virginia was in France from August 1941 to November 1942, so
before the time that Nora was there.
And then she didn't come back until March 1944, after Nora had
already been arrested. And then she stayed through
(47:14):
until the end of the war. I don't mind the change in this
movie that they had their paths crossed and had them have a
relationship. I mean, I don't think it heard
anything. No, I also don't mind it.
I think it's good for storytelling purposes, except I
feel like people might not look into the real story, maybe
because the rest of it is fairlyaccurate already.
(47:36):
Like you, you got to feel that they're telling true stories in
this movie. But like you said, I don't know
if it really it hurts anyone. I don't think it does.
And it doesn't really hurt your memory either.
I I feel like she would have been friends with pretty much
anybody. She seemed like a friendly
little girl on my side. Keep referring to her as a
little girl, even though she's awoman.
(47:58):
She was like, 30. Yeah.
She was 30 when she was executed.
Yeah. The only thing is that I saw a
review where they were talking about how they were like, well,
obviously Khan's plotline was less interesting because she was
just sitting around like tappingmessages in Morse code.
And I was like, honestly, that'show I know this movie didn't do
her story justice because I listened to this four part
(48:20):
podcast earlier in rapt attention.
Man, it was so interesting. She was constantly almost
getting caught and having to come up with new and creative
ways to transmit her adventure was, I think, overshadowed by
all this stuff that Virginia Hall did in the movie and in
real life. I I think it's much more
interesting than that. I wonder too, if the fact that
(48:42):
the actress who plays Virginia has a producer and a writer's
role, if that affects her part in the story a bit.
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure it does. And I mean, I guess the other
perspective is she could have just written a movie about
Virginia Hall and not included Con at all, you know?
Right, right. I feel like I'm hopeful that
we'll get more movies of the menin Robert here.
(49:05):
I feel like we deserve some and people are dying man.
We need to tell these stories before the people that knew
anything about it are dead. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. And during the period of 1944
and 45, which is the part that doesn't really get covered in
the movie hall, was really instrumental in readying France
for the D-Day landings. Like I said earlier, this woman
(49:27):
was everywhere involved in everything.
And then she was building up anti Nazi fighter groups in the
mountains of Austria right towards the end of the war.
And that's actually where she met her husband, fellow OS US
agent Paul Golio. How romantic.
Just both fighting Nazis, right?Right.
I love doing the research for this.
It's kind of influenced how I feel about the movie at the
(49:49):
Speaking of which, we probably need to rate the movie.
Yeah, we definitely need to ratethe movie.
Should we rate it? Cuthbert's out of 10.
Yes, we definitely. I'm not choosing words that you
(50:11):
find difficult to say on purpose.
Are you sure? Well, maybe a little.
Yeah, it's funny. Anyway, I'll start because I
want to start today. I'm rating this movie, I don't
know, 7 cut birds out of 10. I like it more for the stories
it tells than the way it tells the stories.
(50:32):
So I'm really glad these women, that some lights shine on that,
shine on that. What's the word?
Some like? Some shine, Shine.
Oh. My God, now you're light.
Light Sean on them. Yeah, Sean Pieces.
Sentence I'm really glad that this room is dead in the
(50:56):
spotlight and just wish that they've gotten a slightly better
spotlight. Overall.
It's alright. Like I said, I enjoyed myself
and I enjoyed researching specifically, but I just feel
like it would do much better as Unlimited series or just a movie
focused on one of the three ladies.
So the acting was fine, the storytelling wasn't bad, but it
(51:20):
kind of deserved a little bit more depth and emotion.
There's only a couple scenes that were really emotional, but
I would love to have seen a little bit more motivation in
this. And there's a lot of exposition
through radios and all that sortof stuff, but there's not a lot
of motivations in this. So I would like some work,
please. How about you?
Yeah, I think that all of these women were, I don't want to say
(51:44):
eccentric because that could have a negative connotation.
They were all characters. They were all larger than life
in their own way. They were all just
extraordinary. And I think that you could
definitely devote a movie or like you said, maybe make a
limited series where you devote a lot more time to each of them
and you get to know them as people because they are so
interesting. And I think because that didn't
(52:05):
happen, it did lose some emotional impact.
When I listened to the four partminiseries on newer Con, I cried
at the end. You know, it was just hearing
about this, this woman that the Nazis couldn't break.
She's a children's writer, you know, no one would have expected
it of her. And then in the movie, I just
didn't have the same kind of emotional impact for me.
(52:25):
But I agree, I had a really goodtime researching.
And sometimes with these movies,it's kind of of no fault of
their own, but they get so absorbed in the importance of
telling this story because maybethis is the only movie that gets
made about female spies. You know, we know all about how
much work Kate Winslow had to put in to get the Lee movie made
because this is kind of a genre where there's not a ton of
(52:49):
content out there where there are female leads and female main
characters and female protagonists.
So I think that a lot of the times these movies get caught up
in, you know, the importance of telling the story over the
content of the story itself. So I'm going to say I'll give it
a 6 1/2 out of 10. I don't think it was a bad
movie, but like you said, I think it could have been better.
(53:10):
For me, I think the back half was more interesting than the
first half. It kind of picked up a lot.
There's a lot, a lot more actiony stuff happening, but
yeah, I would have really loved to see a lot more depth and
breadth about these women. I feel like that's the
exposition part they do in the first maybe half hour, 45
minutes. It's all just telling people
(53:31):
lots of stuff instead of showingpeople in the second-half kind
of does a better job at showing you what's going on, so maybe
that's why. Yeah, you're probably right.
That sounds right. Are you reading anything?
(53:52):
Oh shit, what am I reading? Oh wait, did I start any book on
my phone? She's gone to get her entire
stack of books. I mean, how many books are there
in your stack currently? A lot.
We don't have to talk about no. We don't talk about brain.
No, no, no. Well, I bought a book about DF
(54:12):
that got stolen off my porch, soI've ordered a new one, but I
don't have it yet. But rude, right?
Who would steal a $7.00 used book off my porch?
Like if you want to read it thatbad, ask me if you can borrow
it. So I've just got this other new
one, well, new to me, called TheWomen Who Flew for Hitler.
A true story of soaring ambitionand searing rivalry by Claire
Mulley, who also wrote Agent Zoe.
(54:34):
So excited to dig into this one.Did you finish Agents out?
I've not done it yet but I'm I've read like I've half read
like 47 different books recentlyso I will circle back.
I feel like I'm in the same boatslash book all the time.
I keep reading the same. I'm reading three books at the
same time, which is fine. I haven't finished either of
(54:54):
them, but I need to hurry the fuck up.
Yeah, get on it. Thank you, everyone for
listening once again to Rosie the reviewer.
You can share this episode with a friend and you can find us
wherever you get your podcast because I forgot to say just
now. You can also follow us on
Instagram if you like. You're pretty nice.
And what else? You can find more information
(55:18):
like the podcast we listen to and documentary we've seen.
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