The Spy Princess, 1940

This is a photograph of Noor Inayat Khan, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Tipu Sultan, the 18th Century Muslim ruler of Mysore. He had refused to submit to British rule and was killed in battle in 1799. Noor was born on January 1, 1914 in Russia to an Indian father and American mother. Her childhood was spent in London and she was raised in France as well.

This photograph was taken after she had joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in November 1940. In 1942 she was recruited to join the Special Operations Executive as a radio operator. The SOE was a secret organisation established in Britain to sabotage the Nazi war machine, which was achieved by dispatching male and female operatives to assist local resistance in occupied Europe.

In June 1943, Khan began to work for the ‘Prosper’ resistance network in Paris under the codename ‘Madeleine’. After a summer sending messages back to London, that October she was betrayed, arrested by the Gestapo and, after a year in captivity under solitary confinement, was executed at Dachau concentration camp in September 1944. She was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre and George Cross in 1949.