.png)
8 hours ago
2
Noreen Riols, who has died aged 98, served within the wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE), which coordinated resistance operations behind enemy lines. Her main role lay in training officers for surveillance work by acting as their target. She also acted as a “honey trap” in the final test before agents were sent into the field, trying to seduce them into giving away their mission.
Recruited in 1943, at the age of 17, on the basis of her fluency in French, Riols was too young to be sent into France and was initially employed within F Section, preparing agents to go there. But in February 1944, she was sent to the SOE “finishing school” at Beaulieu in the New Forest, the final stage of every SOE agent’s training course, where a professional burglar taught them how to pick locks, and they were trained in the skills they would need as an agent operating on the ground constantly on the lookout for the enemy surveillance.
The training exercises mainly took place in the nearby towns of Bournemouth and Southampton. “It was there that we taught future agents how to follow someone,” Riols said. “How to find out where they were going, who they were seeing, without being detected. How to detect if someone were following them and throw them off. How to pass messages without any sign of recognition.”
Riols’s favourite trick to lose her male trainees was to go into the local department store. “I’d make for the ladies’ lingerie department. It would suddenly dawn on them that they were getting some very odd looks from other women and from the girls at the counters. I used to hold up a few unmentionables just to make them look a little more embarrassed.”
On one occasion, she was asked to test an agent who was being sent into occupied Denmark. She chatted him up and as the conversation became more romantic persuaded him to explain why he would not be able to see her for a while.
Whenever a honey trap had worked, Riols would walk in midway through the agent’s final interview, the instructor would ask: “Do you know this woman?” and they would realise they had fallen for a trap. “Most of them took it well,” Riols said. “But I’ll never forget this one. He was a Dane – oh, a glorious blond Adonis. I think he was rather taken with me. When I entered the room, he looked at me with surprise, and then almost pain. Finally, blind fury took over. He half rose in his chair and said: ‘You bitch!’”
Riols was born in Valletta, Malta, where her father, Richard Baxter, was serving with the Royal Navy. With her mother, Nora (nee Weild), following her husband on a number of postings abroad, Noreen, a fluent French speaker, was sent to the Lycée Français in South Kensington, London, to study. When the school was handed over to the Free French Air Force in 1940, she was one of a handful of older students who remained in London and by her own admission did very little studying. “I spent most of the time careering around Kensington on the back of a motorbike clinging ecstatically to the muscular waist of a French airman.”
When she was called up in 1943, her first choice was to be a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, known as the Wrens, because she thought the hats they wore were “very stylish”. But as a former student at the Lycée, she was already marked out for work with the SOE’s French section, which was sending agents into occupied France to work with the French resistance.
It was a life-changing experience for a teenager. She would sometimes sit in on the debriefing of agents who had been exfiltrated from occupied France where they had lived day and night doing their best to avoid the attention of the Gestapo.
“For me it was a revelation to see their different reactions,” she recalled. “Some returned with their nerves absolutely shattered, in shreds. Their hands were shaking uncontrollably as they lit cigarette after cigarette. Others were as cool as cucumbers. Many of those agents weren’t very much older than I was. Hearing their incredible stories, witnessing their courage, their total dedication, I changed almost overnight from a teenager to a woman.”
At the end of the war, Riols joined the BBC’s French service, where she first met her future husband Jacques Riols, a highly decorated French war hero. After five years at the BBC, and six months in the British embassy nursery in the Romanian capital, Bucharest, she moved to Paris to work in public relations, where she again met Riols, who was now also in PR. They married in Paris in 1959 and settled in Versailles, where she brought up his three children from his previous marriage and their own two sons.
She became an author and freelance journalist from Paris for Women’s Hour. She wrote seven novels, four of them based on her experiences in SOE, and six works of nonfiction, including the autobiographical The Secret Ministry of Ag & Fish: My Life in Churchill’s School for Spies (2013), a reference to the civil service cover she had to use.
Riols was made a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 2014. She was appointed MBE in 2023 for her work keeping alive the memory of the 104 SOE agents who died in occupied France during the war.
Her husband died in 2018. She is survived by their five children, Olivier, Hervé, Marie-France, Yves-Michel and Christopher.
