WVAC: The Spy Princess

This work tells the extraordinary story of Noor Inayat Khan, a descendant of the Indian ruler Tipu Sultan and one of the most courageous British secret agents of the Second World War. Born in Moscow to a family shaped by Sufi teaching and pacifist ideals, Noor’s path to wartime espionage was unexpected and singular. Recruited into the Special Operations Executive, she was deployed to occupied France as a wireless operator, one of the most dangerous roles in the resistance, where her transmissions kept networks alive under constant threat of detection.

Directed by Emily Raymond, drawing on meticulous research and the novel by Shrabani Basu, Rebecca Lenkiewicz has adapted this novel which traces Noor’s life from her early years through to her arrest by the Gestapo, revealing the scale of her endurance under extreme brutality. Held in solitary confinement, starved, beaten and chained, Noor refused to betray her colleagues or even disclose her true identity. After ten months in captivity, she was transferred to Dachau concentration camp and executed on 13 September 1944. She was one of only three women SOE agents to be awarded the George Cross, a recognition of a courage that survived torture, imprisonment, and death, whose final word, “Liberté,” continues to resonate.