THE SOMERTON MAN CASE: PHYLISS LATOUR DOYLE< SOE AGENT

 

PHYLISS LATOUR DOYLE MBE

Yesterday was Phyliss Latour Doyle's 101st Birthday, she is the last surviving member of the SOE  who parachuted into France at the age of 23 and carried out various acts of espionage in conjunction with French Resistance fighters.

She started her wartime work as a flight mechanic in the Women's Royal Airforce but, because of her fluent French-speaking ability she was quickly spotted and recruited by the Special Operations Executive.

As you read through the following article, you will see that not only was she an extremely courageous woman, but she was also extraordinarily clever at concealing codes.

So here we have a young, 23-year-old woman, an airframe fitter I believe, being recruited and trained as an agent, she learned code encryption, concealment, and no doubt a host of other espionage tactics and successfully evaded capture whilst carrying out vital work for the Allies.

SOE methods were taken up by Australian Army Intelligence as you will read elsewhere in this book, amongst recruiting methods used, they would find suitable candidates from the nursing profession and, under guise of nursing training, some were secretly trained as cipher clerks and agents. Would this be how The Nurse Jessica Harkness, became involved in Cold War espionage?

A good read is Leo Marks's 'Between Silk and Cyanide' where many of the methods used by SOE are described, including the use of silk as a codebook as described in the following article.

This piece is courtesy of the MIGHTYGIRL.COM site:

PHYLISS LATOUR DOYLE MBE

n May 1944, a 23-year-old British secret agent named Phyllis Latour Doyle parachuted into occupied Normandy to gather intelligence on Nazi positions in preparation for D-Day. As an agent for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), Doyle – who celebrates her 101st birthday this week – secretly relayed 135 coded messages to the British military before France's liberation in August. She took advantage of the fact that the Nazi occupiers and their French collaborators were generally less suspicious of women, using the knitting she carried as a way to hide her codes. For seventy years, Doyle's contributions to the war effort were largely unheralded, but she was finally given her due in 2014 when she was awarded France's highest honor, the Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.

Doyle first joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force at age 20 in 1941 to work as a flight mechanic, but SOE recruiters spotted her potential and offered her a job as a spy. A close family friend – her godmother's father who she viewed as her grandfather – had been shot by the Nazis and she was eager to support the war effort however she could. Doyle immediately accepted the SOE's offer and began an intensive training program. In addition to learning about encryption and surveillance, trainees also had to pass grueling physical tests. Doyle described how they were taught by a cat burglar who had been released from jail on "how to get in a high window, and down drain pipes, how to climb over roofs without being caught."

She first deployed to Aquitaine in Vichy France where she worked for a year as a spy using the codename Genevieve. Her most dangerous mission, however, began on May 1, 1944 when she jumped out of a U.S. Air Force bomber and landed behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied Normandy. Using the codename Paulette, she posed as a poor teenage French girl. Doyle used a bicycle to tour the region, often under the guise of selling soap, and passed information to the British on Nazi positions using coded messages. In an interview with the New Zealand Army News magazine, she described how risky the mission, noting that "The men who had been sent just before me were caught and executed. I was told I was chosen for that area [of France] because I would arouse less suspicion."

She also explained how she concealed her codes: "I always carried knitting because my codes were on a piece of silk – I had about 2,000 I could use. When I used a code I would just pinprick it to indicate it had gone. I wrapped the piece of silk around a knitting needle and put it in a flat shoe lace which I used to tie my hair up." Coded messages took a half an hour to send, and the Germans could identify where a signal was sent from in an hour and a half, so Doyle moved constantly to avoid detection. At times, she stayed with Allied sympathizers, but often she had to sleep in forests and forage for food. During her months in Normandy, Doyle sent 135 secret messages conveying invaluable information on Nazi troop positions, which was used to help Allied forces prepare for the Normandy landings on D-Day and during the subsequent military campaign. Doyle continued her mission until France's liberation in August 1944.

Following the war, Doyle eventually settled in New Zealand where she raised four children. It was only in the past 15 years that she told them about her career as a spy. In presenting the Chevalier of the Legion of Honour to Doyle, French Ambassador Laurent Contini commended her courage during the war, stating: "I have deep admiration for her bravery and it will be with great honor that I will present her with the award of Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest decoration."