The Librarian Who Became a Spy

Before WWII, Vera Atkins was a Romanian-born librarian and socialite who spoke four languages and had a photographic memory. She joined SOE's French Section as an intelligence officer and personally recruited and managed 39 agents sent into occupied France — 13 of whom were women, highly unusual for the era. Vera tracked each agent's movements, encoded their messages, and maintained an extraordinary system of filing that included the smallest details of their covers. When 13 of her agents went missing near the end of the war, Vera personally investigated their fates after the liberation, traveling to concentration camps, interviewing survivors, and collecting evidence to send to war crimes trials. She found that many had been executed. At Nuremberg, she personally served as a witness against those who had murdered her agents.