Drawing on interviews with relatives and friends of both Atkins and her agents, and on full access to Atkins's private papers, Helm has produced a memorable portrait of a woman who knowingly sent other women to their deaths and a searing history of female courage and suffering during WWII. Helm's portrait of Atkins is acute, dwelling evocatively on her Romanian-Jewish origins and their social significance for Atkins within upper-crust British circles, and on Atkins's mysterious personal life. Helm, a founding member of London's Independent, brilliantly reconstructs Atkins's harrowing detective work, shedding light in particular on the fate of missing agent Noor Inayat Khan, whose suitability for the job had been widely doubted. Sarah Helm, author of A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII, is no stranger to the journalistic pursuits and rabbit trails in covering foreign affairs. In 1945, after the war, Atkins, fiercely loyal to the memory of her missing agents, took it upon herself to spend a year interviewing concentration camp officials and survivors in order to piece together her agents' fates. Many were caught by the Gestapo and subsequently disappeared and presumed dead. Atkins sent 400 agents into France, including 39 women she'd personally recruited and supervised. Vera Atkins (1908–2000) was the highest-ranking female official in the French section of a WWII British intelligence unit that aided the resistance.
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