The Secret War on Baker Street

Walking the London high street where the Special Operations Executive was built above the shops, trained its agents, and trusted a city to keep silent.

The Neighborhood That Went to War

Day 3 in London. Baker Street: where the largest clandestine organization any democracy ever fielded hid itself in plain sight on a commercial high street, and where its paper trail went up in smoke.

On the morning of her first day at work, in the autumn of 1941, a seventeen‑year‑old English girl named Elizabeth Small walked into 64 Baker Street and was asked to sign the Official Secrets Act before she was shown to her desk.

She signed. She did not really understand what she had signed. She was seventeen. She had come up to London looking for a job. A family friend had put her name forward. The office she walked into, on an upper floor of a Victorian building three doors down from Selfridges, had a reception desk and a telephone and a view of the street below. It looked like any other London office.

She met her new boss, a man introduced as Captain George Noble, British Army. Within thirty minutes she had realized that Captain Noble was French. His English was perfect until he got tired. When he got tired, it became French. One of the RAF officers in the room was teasing him about it when she came in. Captain Noble was not actually Captain Noble. He was one of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French officers, attached under cover to the British Special Operations Executive, and he was the person Elizabeth Small would work for, eight hours a day, six days a week, for the next four years.

He gave her a page of numbers and dates and told her to type it up, carefully. He wanted one copy. When she was done, she was to take it across the hall to the print shop and have it reproduced on edible paper.

She looked at the page. She looked at Captain Noble. She asked the only honest question she could think of.

Are you sure you want it on edible paper?

He said yes.

He said somebody’s life might depend on it.

So she typed the page. Seventeen years old. First job. She carried it across the hall and asked the men there to print it on edible paper, trying to say the words the way a bank clerk might ask for letterhead. The men in the print shop did not look up. They nodded. They had printed thousands of pages of intelligence on edible paper already. They were about to print thousands more.

So, that’s where I want to begin tonight: with a seventeen‑year‑old girl typing a schedule of parachute drops on edible paper on her first day at work, inside a building that officially didn’t exist, three doors down from a department store where, that same afternoon, her mother could have been buying a hat.

After today’s very full experience, I want write about the real takeaway: what it means to hide a clandestine army inside a neighborhood—and what that says about the country that does it.

How the Empire Accreted

The Special Operations Executive was created on July 22, 1940 in a meeting at 10 Downing Street between Hugh Dalton and Winston Churchill. By October 1940, it had outgrown its rooms at St. Ermin’s and moved its operational headquarters to 64 Baker Street. By February 1941, its first agent had parachuted into France. From charter to first operation: seven months.

Seven months is not enough time to build any serious institution. It is certainly not enough time to build a clandestine foreign intelligence and sabotage service from scratch, in wartime, against the active opposition of most of your own government. SOE rushed into the field because Hugh Dalton knew the agency had enemies who would strangle it at the first opportunity, and the only argument against strangulation was results.

So they rushed. A lot of the first agents who dropped into France didn’t come home. That’s the price of going early.

The speed produced a real estate problem that ended up shaping everything else about Baker Street. SOE grew faster than its buildings. It outgrew 64 Baker Street within six months and needed more space. Gubbins complained to anyone who would listen. One of his officers had been at school with Simon Marks, whose family owned Marks and Spencer. Marks and Spencer’s headquarters stood at 82 Baker Street, four blocks away. Simon Marks offered SOE the top floor.

Then the floor below. Then the next floor down.

By 1943, SOE had absorbed most of the Marks and Spencer building and half a dozen others up and down Baker Street and in the side streets between Portman Square and Regent’s Park. Flats in Montagu Mansions. A tailor’s workshop at 221. Counterfeit documents on an upper floor of 82. Safe houses on Gloucester Place. A pale yellow building at the top of the street that housed the Norwegian agents who later destroyed the heavy water plant at Vemork. Another, further down, where the Danish section planned an operation that would never happen. A flat where Vera Atkins, the section’s operational memory, did the last pocket search before an agent went to Tempsford.

Today we walked those four miles of streets and tried to imagine the noise: the trams, the lorries, the milk carts, and above them the sound of a secret war being improvised on the fly.

The whole neighborhood was SOE. The neighborhood pretended it was not. Londoners bought their milk and caught the Tube and ate lunch in Baker Street pubs for five and a half years while the largest clandestine organization any democracy had ever fielded operated above them, and almost nobody talked.

Standing here, you’ve got to try to hearken back to those days. An empire of secrets, growing floor by floor in the middle of a shopping district, during a war, hidden by nothing more than the habit of ordinary English people not asking questions they had been given no reason to ask. That is the real operational miracle of the British home front in the Second World War. It’s not cinematic. In fact, it’s the opposite of cinematic. A civilization at war with Nazi Germany kept its own secrets on a high street where a young woman could walk past the door of the agency that had just sent her sister’s fiancé to his death, and never know.

221 Baker Street

The Tailor Shop

Turn off Baker Street into a side street and a few doors down you find the lot that used to be 221. The front of the building is gone now, hidden behind a 1960s facade, but the footprint is there. In 1940, SOE set up its first tailor shop in that building.

An agent going into occupied France couldn’t wear British clothes. Every label, every stitch, every button, every pocket lining had to be French. The Germans knew what a British‑made suit looked like the way a London tailor knew a German one. The tailor shop at 221 Baker Street existed to solve that problem.

It was staffed mostly by émigré tailors. Many were Central European Jewish refugees who had arrived in Britain in the late 1930s with their knowledge of continental cuts and buttons. Some still had family in occupied Europe. Some already knew their relatives were dead. They sat in a workshop above Baker Street sewing French labels into jackets cut to French patterns, using French buttons bought from a specialist dealer in the East End who had sourced them from a defunct Belgian firm, for agents they would never meet who were about to parachute into countries they could no longer visit.

The lining of a raincoat. The tag on a schoolboy’s cap. A woman’s handbag made to look as if it had been bought in Lyon in 1938. Shoes soled in the French way, with the arch stitched in a pattern a British cobbler would not know. Cigarette ends in a pocket from a French brand, ash still clinging. A dry‑cleaning receipt in French, dated three weeks ago, from a shop in a town the agent had never seen but was about to claim as home.

Every surface a Gestapo officer might examine at a checkpoint had been touched by those tailors first.

Hardy Amies ran much of that work. He was not yet Sir Hardy Amies, not yet the Queen’s dressmaker. He was a young London dressmaker in SOE’s Belgian section, spending most of the war inside Baker Street. The Belgian government decorated him after the war for services he could not describe. He rarely spoke of them, which is part of why the Belgian section is one of the least documented and F Section one of the most.

Amies went back to Savile Row. He dressed the Queen for forty years. He was knighted. And he kept quiet about the clothes he had made before those clothes: coats and dresses that walked into German‑held Lyon at three in the morning carrying forged French ration books and wireless crystals sewn into collars.

The Women

From the beginning, over the resistance of much of the uniformed British military, Colin Gubbins insisted that women be trained and deployed as field agents on equal terms with men.

His argument was simple and correct. In guerrilla warfare, he wrote in the Partisan Leader’s Handbook, sex is operationally irrelevant. Women draw less suspicion at checkpoints. They can move through villages without attracting attention. They carry messages, money, weapons. They deserve ranks and pay. If they’re caught, they’ll be tortured and executed the same as men.

Between 1941 and 1944, roughly thirty‑nine women of F Section parachuted or landed by Lysander into occupied France as SOE agents. Thirteen were killed, most in concentration camps, most by lethal injection or hanging from butcher’s hooks in the last weeks before liberation. Violette Szabo was one. Noor Inayat Khan was one. Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment, Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, Sonya Olschanezky, Cecily Lefort, Yvonne Rudellat, Eliane Plewman, Odette Sansom, Denise Bloch. Sansom survived Ravensbrück. The rest did not.

The training included a scenario most accounts of SOE skip, because they don’t quite know what to do with it. Our superb guides, Chris and Hugh, talked about it this morning, and I’m going to try tell it the way they did, because it’s the piece of tradecraft that makes the rest of the story make sense.

Late in the syllabus at Beaulieu, in the New Forest, an agent fresh from six months of instruction would be sent into a London pub on a routine errand and meet a beautiful woman at the bar. She’d introduce herself, and ask how the agent was enjoying their new posting. She’d be sympathetic, funny, warm. She’d have somewhere private to go after closing time. The agent, tired and lonely, proud of what they were about to do, wanting to tell someone, would sometimes talk. Sometimes talk a lot. Sometimes end up in her flat confessing most of what the section had taught them over brandy.

The next morning, the agent would be summoned to their instructor’s office. The woman from the pub would be sitting in the instructor’s chair. She was a FANY officer. She had been planted there to test whether six months of training had actually taken. The transcript of the previous night’s conversation would be on the desk.

One of the women who ran the scenario later said the point was straightforward. If a pretty face in a Chelsea pub can break you in one evening, a German interrogator will break you in fifteen minutes. Most agents who failed were quietly reassigned. The ones who passed were cleared for deployment.

Standing on Baker Street today, looking up at those windows, I found myself wondering which of the women who passed that test had also already understood the real point: that the country they served would never really be allowed to know what they had done.

Vera Atkins

The Woman Who Went Back for Them

Vera Atkins was F Section’s assistant to Maurice Buckmaster. The section called her “the housewife,” one of those wartime diminutives that hides the actual function. She sat in on every interview, every final briefing, every send‑off. She went with the agents to Tempsford on moon nights. She searched their pockets for the last tell‑tale Underground ticket, the dry‑cleaning stub, the matchbook from a British pub. She watched them climb into the aircraft and disappear into the dark.

When the war ended and 118 of her agents had not come home, and SOE itself was being dissolved, Atkins decided she was not done. She went to Germany. She was not ordered to go. She was not funded to go. She went on her own authority. She spent the better part of three years in the ruins of the Reich tracking down what had happened to each missing F Section woman. She interviewed guards. She walked the grounds of Ravensbrück, Dachau, Natzweiler. She identified bodies. She testified at Nuremberg. She came back to London with names and dates and causes of death for all thirteen women from F Section who had died in the camps, and she spent the rest of her life making sure their families knew.

Atkins guarded her own background more carefully than many of the SOE secrets she kept. She was born Vera Rosenberg in Galați, Romania, to a Jewish family. Her mother was English. She came to Britain in 1937 when it became clear what would happen to Europe’s Jews. She made herself, by choice and effort, into a woman who sounded more English than the English. She did not become a British citizen until 1944, when Buckmaster forced her paperwork through emergency channels so she could stay in place.

She died in 2000, at the age of ninety‑two. She spent fifty‑five years after the war making sure the women who had not come home were not forgotten. She did it from small offices in London, on her own time, with her own money, after a day job.

That is the kind of person who actually wins wars. The country gave her an OBE. It did not build her a statue. The women she found are remembered because Vera Atkins refused to let them be lost. It is hard to imagine a modern bureaucracy tolerating someone like her for very long.

Noor Inayat Khan joined the Prosper network in 1943 as a wireless operator. She was arrested by the Gestapo, sent to Dachau, and later executed.

The Disaster Nobody Wanted to Write About

There is a dark version of the Baker Street story, and Chris didn’t skip it. I shouldn’t either.

In the summer of 1943, F Section’s Prosper network in Paris was comprehensively penetrated by the Sicherheitsdienst. It began with a single captured radio set and widened into what the Germans called a Funkspiel, a radio game. Captured SOE wireless operators were forced to transmit under German control. They were supposed to drop their second security check to signal capture. Several did. Baker Street saw the missing checks. Baker Street decided the operators were tired, or sloppy, or spooked, and told them to be more careful next time.

Baker Street kept dropping agents into reception fields the Germans controlled. For most of a year. Something between twenty‑six and twenty‑seven F Section agents parachuted into France in 1943 and 1944 and walked straight into Gestapo reception committees. They were tortured. Most were executed.

The Dutch section—N Section—had already suffered its own version. The Abwehr ran an Englandspiel, the England game, against SOE’s Dutch network from March 1942 to late 1943. More than fifty Dutch SOE agents parachuted into German‑controlled drop zones. All were captured. Most were executed. The operation nearly destroyed Dutch‑British trust for a generation.

Here’s the part Chris kept coming back to, and honestly, the part that hurts to consider it still today. F Section did not know. The N Section disaster had already happened and F Section didn’t know, because the sections did not talk to each other. Compartmentalization, which protects forward networks, had been applied at the policy level, where, in retrospect, it definitely should not have been. Nobody at 64 Baker Street was in a position to see the pattern across theaters. By the time anyone could see it, the agents were dead.

No after‑action review was conducted. No lessons‑learned document was circulated. The sections kept running their own shows until the end of the war. The history of Prosper took thirty years to write. The full story of Englandspiel took fifty. Some of what we’d like to know is still unknowable, because of the next thing that happened to Baker Street.

The Fire

SOE was dissolved in January 1946. Its functions were divided between MI6 and the British Army. Its records were boxed up and moved to a Foreign Office storage facility.

In 1946, a fire broke out in that facility. It destroyed most of the SOE archive: personal files, operational records, after‑action reports, agent correspondence, casualty lists, the paper trail of five and a half years of clandestine operations in twenty‑five occupied countries.

Some SOE officers were never convinced the fire was accidental. Angus Fyffe, who was helping with the official history, wrote later that when he heard about the fire, “that was the end of SOE as I had known it.” He added that some of the files he had handled were, in his phrase, time bombs waiting to explode. Files that would have embarrassed the Foreign Office over collaborators protected after the war, the Air Ministry over missions refused for political reasons, MI6 over its wartime attempts to undermine SOE, and several European governments in exile over what their politicians had actually been doing.

Whether the fire was an accident or an arrangement, the result is the same. The record of one of the most important clandestine organizations of the twentieth century was almost entirely destroyed six months after it ceased to exist, and the people who carried the secrets in their heads stayed under the Official Secrets Act. Most took what they knew to the grave.

That’s why the Baker Street tour feels the way it does. You’re not walking past buildings with plaques. You are walking past places where the plaques do not exist, where the records do not exist, where many of the names don’t exist, and where the story has to be reassembled by any means available.

Walking there today, I realized how much of what I thought I knew about this kind of work was shaped by archives that survived somewhere else. Here, the archive is gone. The physical neighborhood we walked today is the only real file left.

The plant in 1947 or 1948. The heavy water was produced in the front building, the Hydrogen Production Plant

Vemork

I want to finish the operational story with the one clean operation SOE ran in the entire war—the one where the mission went in, hit the target, did not blow back on a civilian population, and changed the shape of the conflict.

The Norsk Hydro plant at Vemork, in the mountains of Telemark in southern Norway, was the first industrial facility in Europe capable of producing deuterium oxide, heavy water, at scale. Heavy water was the moderator the German atomic weapons program needed for a nuclear reactor. Britain knew this because a Norwegian chemical engineer named Leif Tronstad escaped to London in 1941 and told them.

SOE and the Norwegian government‑in‑exile planned three operations against the plant.

Operation Grouse, November 1942: four Norwegian advance‑party agents parachuted onto the Hardangervidda plateau to prepare a reception site.

Operation Freshman, November 1942: thirty‑four Royal Engineer commandos in two Horsa gliders, towed by Halifax bombers, were meant to land on a frozen lake and join Grouse for the assault. Both tows failed in bad weather. One Halifax flew into a mountainside in zero visibility and killed its crew. The other released its glider. Both gliders crashed. The survivors were captured, tortured, and executed under Hitler’s Commando Order: some shot by firing squad, some given lethal injections, some thrown alive from aircraft into the North Sea. No one made it home. The Grouse party, still on the plateau, waited in a hunting hut for three months, eating raw reindeer because they couldn’t risk a fire, stripping bark from the walls to stay alive.

The Gunnerside Team safely back in Britain after their successful mission.

Operation Gunnerside, February 1943: six more Norwegian agents parachuted in and linked up with Grouse. On the night of 27 February 1943, the ten‑man team descended six hundred feet of snow‑filled gorge, crossed a half‑frozen river with their kit held above their heads, climbed six hundred feet up the far side to the base of the plant, cut the chain on a cable tunnel Tronstad had described, slipped inside without being seen, placed plastic charges on eighteen heavy‑water cells at the lowest level, and escaped.

One Norwegian civilian worker, inside the plant, asked them mid‑escape to wait while he went back for his glasses. They waited.

The charges blew. Heavy water poured down the drains. The German nuclear program lost a year of production in eight seconds.

The team left a Thompson submachine gun on the floor, a weapon that clearly marked the raid as a military operation by Allied soldiers, not a partisan attack, because they did not want German reprisals against civilians. The tactic worked. No civilians were shot for Vemork.

Three thousand German troops searched the Hardangervidda for weeks. The Gunnerside team skied two hundred miles across the roof of Norway to the Swedish border and crossed out. None were captured. All survived.

The Germans started repairs. American bombers hit the plant on 16 November 1943 with 143 B‑17s and finished what the Norwegians had begun. The Germans then tried to move the remaining heavy water and equipment to Germany by rail and ferry across Lake Tinn. SOE learned of the move. One of the Gunnerside veterans, Knut Haukelid, planted time‑fused plastic charges in the bilge of the SF Hydro ferry on the night of 19 February 1944, set to detonate in the deepest part of the lake.

The ferry went down at 10:45 the next morning. The heavy water went with it. Twenty‑six Norwegian civilians and four German guards died, along with fourteen Norwegian railway workers and passengers.

Haukelid spent the rest of his life justifying that decision to himself and to Norwegian families. The alternative, he said, was a German nuclear weapon. He was probably right. Most serious historians now agree that the Norsk Hydro operations together delayed the German atomic effort by at least a year, possibly two, which meant the bomb could not be completed before Germany lost the war.

Ten Norwegian men descending a gorge in the dark, inside six inches of ice, with rucksacks full of explosives, may have prevented Nazi Germany from finishing a nuclear weapon.

They’d been trained out of offices here, on Baker Street.

The Pub at Lunchtime

I want to end with something Hugh said this afternoon, because it is the detail that has resonated throughout the day for me.

There were almost no restaurants in wartime London. Almost no sandwich shops. Lunch was the pub. Every weekday at noon, hundreds of SOE staff came out of the buildings on Baker Street and went into side‑street pubs to eat. They mixed with bank clerks and Marks and Spencer buyers and BBC producers and Underground drivers and the wives of men who were away. They had a pint and a sandwich, and went back to work.

Nobody talked.

For five and a half years, in a hundred pubs, across a neighborhood where everyone knew something was going on in the big buildings on Baker Street and almost nobody asked, people kept their mouths shut. SOE’s secrecy didn’t hold because the agency was isolated. It held because Londoners had silently agreed to let it be.

There’s no way to film that. It’s too quiet. And it’s too ordinary.

It’s also the part that matters most if you’re trying to understand why democracies sometimes win these wars. Germany could not have done it. The Soviet Union couldn’t have done it. A country where a secretary is told on her first day that someone’s life may depend on her not making a mistake, and she goes home that night and doesn’t tell her mother, and her mother doesn’t ask, and the pub regulars don’t ask, and the bakery next door doesn’t ask, and the neighborhood doesn’t ask, for five and a half years—that’s a country with a kind of social trust a totalitarian state simply can’t manufacture.

Baker Street today

That’s what Baker Street looked like in 1943: an empire of secrets growing floor by floor above a shopping street in central London, during the loudest war in human history, held together by a seventeen‑year‑old girl typing a parachute schedule on edible paper and a neighborhood that had agreed not to ask.

Tonight, after four miles of walking those streets, I find myself asking a question I don’t know how to answer. If my own country needed that kind of quiet, durable trust now—not the flag‑waving kind, but the kind where you keep your mouth shut in the pub because you understand, without being told, what’s at stake—would we still have it?

The records burned in 1946. The people carried what they knew into old age and took most of it with them. The buildings still stand. You can walk past them tomorrow morning on your way to a coffee shop.

Tomorrow we go to Tempsford. The airfield where the Lysanders took off at night. The field where Szabo got on the plane for the second time.

Stay tuned…We’ll write about it all tomorrow night.

—John