Author Spotlight: Helen Fry

Historian and biographer Helen Fry is the bestselling author of The Walls Have Ears, Spymaster, MI9, and more than twenty books on intelligence, espionage and the social history of the Second World War.

Across the twentieth century’s two world wars, women were a vast, hidden workforce of intelligencers, codebreakers, spies, secret agents, handlers and double agents. Helen Fry’s latest book Women in Intelligence provides the first full history of women in British intelligence across two world wars. At the outbreak of the First World War, women began to take on a range of roles in espionage, from knitting codes into jumpers to running entire spy networks. By the Second World War, they were also working as double agents, interrogators and parachuting behind enemy lines. In Bletchley Park and Whitehall, women in military intelligence kept the British war engine running. Helen’s panoramic history showcases the inspirational contributions of these remarkable women.   

Helen shared with us an extract from Women in Intelligence, out in paperback on 25 June…..  

I NEVER KNEW HIS NAME 

Leicester Square, London, October 1942 

The ground floor café of the Quality Inn in Leicester Square was bustling with men and women, some in uniform, grabbing what little relaxation and pleasure they could. London had been heavily bombed and the fears that Hitler planned to invade England persisted. Standing in the doorway, Lesley Wyle strained to see if any of the tables were free. A waitress approached and showed her to the only vacant table, and she ordered a cup of coffee. 

Lesley Wyle was not her original name. Born Ilse Eisinger in Vienna in 1921, she had fled Nazi-occupied Austria after Kristallnacht on 9/10 November 1938, when Jewish businesses and shops had been smashed leaving shattered glass across the pavements of the once cultured city. She had been lucky to escape to the safety of England. 

As she sipped her coffee that day in autumn 1942, she reflected on Britain’s ignorance of the military might of the German war machine – which she herself had witnessed on the streets of Vienna. The country’s naivety shocked her. With little understanding of how the odds were stacked against them, Britain’s fighting spirit and resolve endured – and last December the Americans had joined the fight. 

Her thoughts were interrupted by a slight clearing of the throat and a male voice: ‘Excuse me, madam. May I join you?’ She glanced up to see a man in RAF uniform. 

‘There are no spare tables,’ he added. ‘May I join you? I won’t disturb you.’ 

‘Yes, of course.’ 

They sat in silence for a few minutes, before he said, ‘I couldn’t help noticing your accent. Do you speak many languages?’ 

‘Yes, German. I am originally from Vienna. I have been working as a nanny in Banbury.’ 

He leant slightly across the table, his voice urgent. ‘You are wasting your time. With your fluency in English and German, you should be working for the Ministry of Information or the BBC. I am going on a dangerous mission tonight and I might not come back. I want you to promise me something.’ He handed her two postage stamps. ‘Please, take these stamps and stick them on the envelopes of the two letters you are going to write.’ 

He scribbled two addresses on a scrap of paper and slid it across the table. ‘Promise me . . .’ he said. 

‘I promise’, she replied. 

He stood up and tilted his head in respectful goodbye. She watched him weave his way across the room and suddenly he was gone.

That evening, she posted two letters to the addresses on the scrap of paper, offering her services. And four months later, in February 1943, she joined a secret section of the BBC Monitoring Service, first at Evesham in Worcestershire and then at Caversham in Berkshire. Wearing a set of headphones, she listened in to German broadcasts: ‘we had very a primitive recording equipment device behind us and a radio in front of us’, she explained. ‘There were cylinders and we touched a button to turn it on and cut grooves into the cylinder. We recorded everything, then transcribed and translated.’ The listeners worked in three shifts, including throughout the night, because foreign broadcasts transmitted at different times. They monitored for Bletchley Park, the codebreaking site in Buckinghamshire, and the War Office. Lesley went on to carry out intelligence duties, attached to the civil censorship division of the American army in post-war Germany, where she monitored German correspondence and translated letters. 

When I interviewed Lesley over Zoom during the pandemic in 2020, she was approaching the age of 100. She sat in her room in Canada, still so bright and mentally alert, her memory sharp, as she regaled me with events from her wartime career. She recounted the story of the RAF officer, then added something which has remained with me. 

She said, ‘I never saw him again. I never knew his name, or whether he ever came back from his dangerous mission, but that chance encounter changed my life.’ 

It sent goosebumps down my spine. 

Over eighty years later, she still had no idea whether the man who had recruited her for intelligence work had survived the war. He was prepared to sacrifice his life to defeat Nazi Germany, for freedom, and it touched something deep within her. She trusted him that day in October 1942 and was prepared to do what she could for the country that had saved her from certain death in the Holocaust. 

Lesley’s story is one of many inspirational accounts that I have discovered during the course of writing this book. Many of those involved kept their experiences working for British intelligence secret, even from their own families… 

Across the twentieth century’s two world wars, women were a vast, hidden workforce of intelligencers, codebreakers, spies, secret agents, handlers and double agents. Ironically, their enormous contribution to the secret world of intelligence has not solely been eclipsed by men or a focus on male agents. Women in intelligence and their precise work within the armed services and civilian agencies (MI5 and MI6) has been obscured primarily by official secrecy. Generally, in the intelligence field, women were not automatically restricted by their sex. Some services in wartime – especially within military, naval and air intelligence – appointed women to roles because they were either the best person for the job or had the right skills for it. 

It is now well over a century since the formation of the British Secret Service in 1909, yet our picture of women’s crucial work in intelligence has heretofore been murky. Women have been the missing dimension in intelligence history, but that is changing. Helen Fry’s latest book Women in Intelligence does much more than just acknowledge that women ‘were there’. It reveals many untold stories of women as practitioners in the field of intelligence – civilian and uniformed – as well as female spies, both well known and unknown, and assesses their contribution. 

Women’s intelligence careers so often took place in the shadows, their work shrouded by the cloak of official secrecy, making them ‘invisible spies’. But another factor in their invisibility has also been historians’ unconscious bias – an assumption that if women’s roles were not evidenced to the same degree as men’s, then they must not have been of importance. Just as damaging has been the enduring fascination with glamorous female spies, honey traps and seduction, which has obscured the real role of women in espionage. What is far more exciting – and to be celebrated – is what Helen Fry’s book has revealed again and again: that women in intelligence, across two world wars, emerged as specialists in their field. It meant that women were at the heart of some of the most important intelligence operations of wartime, and that can now be celebrated through this new research. 

Today, historians have the benefit of thousands of declassified files to begin to shine a light on these stories and to analyse the contribution of women to intelligence. The picture can probably never be complete, but we can now start to understand how their expertise became central to some of the most important intelligence networks and counter-espionage operations of the twentieth century. Women, as well as men, have shaped the ways in which intelligence has been carried out and methodologies developed. They have been catalysts for many high-level and successful operations in the history of British intelligence. Their stories have been hidden for far too long. A grateful nation owes a profound sense of gratitude for their self-sacrifice and their diverse efforts in the fight for freedom and democracy.