In the past few decades, many of the greatest espionage secrets of the British and American governments from World War II have finally been revealed. As I’ve mentioned in several other reviews, this has led to a growing awareness and increasing coverage of the important roles played by women in some of the most dangerous and sensitive Allied secret organizations and operations, in helping to win the war against the Axis powers.
The many books, memoirs, movies and TV shows that have followed these gradual revelations are endlessly fascinating and intriguing, while also making some of the same points over and over: women were often effective as spies, code breakers and operatives in part because they were less suspected by the opposition than the men were.
At the same time, they had to constantly battle within their own organizations for respect, assignments and positions due to the same heavy sexism and “old boy networks” that dominated the leadership of all the warring societies of the times. And they could be very tough and resourceful, sometimes more so than most of the men around them.
Among the by-now most widely recognized and revered women spies who fought in the secret war against the Nazis are the three who are the main subjects of this Netflix docudrama, A Call to Spy. The first, Vera Atkins (played ably here by Stana Katic), was a Jewish woman from Romania who was an early recruit to the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Winston Churchill’s secret organization for waging clandestine war against the Axis powers. From a humble start in a clerical position, she rapidly rose to a role as a leading organizer of SOE secret operations in Europe.
The SOE’s primary assignment was “to set Europe ablaze” with sabotage, spying and subversion. Atkins’ storied career included some dangerous early assignments she herself carried out, but her greatest contribution to SOE was in recruiting and running female agents, and helping to build the clandestine networks the SOE set up in occupied France.
Virginia Hall (Sarah Megan Thomas) was one of the agents recruited by Atkins to the SOE, who became one of the Nazi’s most hunted enemies in the secret war in France. An American woman with a partially amputated leg from a hunting accident, who wore a wooden prosthetic leg as a result, Hall was nevertheless a brilliant operative and network leader, who survived many dangerous actions and repeatedly avoided capture to become one of the leading Allied agents in France.
Remarkably, and despite her physical handicap, she did all this during two different long tours in France, the first with the British SOE as an agent/network leader early in the war, and then later (after the SOE considered her "blown" because of her notoriety and the German price on her head) with William Donovan’s American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where she served as a wireless operator and a key agent in organizing support for the French resistance. She went on to a long career with the American CIA after the war.
Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte) was an Englishwoman, born in Russia of Indian parents, who became a wireless operator in the WAAF (the British women’s air force auxiliary), from which she was recruited by Atkins. She eventually become the first female wireless operator sent into occupied France.
Wireless operators had the difficult but vital job as secret agents of serving as the main communications link back to the SOE in England for entire networks of spies in France, by quickly tapping out coded radio messages from fellow agents on a teletype key. They carried out this dangerous mission, while having to constantly move to new “safe houses”, and find new hiding places for their suitcase-sized radio equipment and antennas, while also trying to evade aggressive radio tracking by French police and Nazi counter-intelligence agents.
Khan’s doomed career was particularly noteworthy, because she was the first Moslem agent in the British secret services. She was arrested in 1944, and sent to Dachau concentration camp, where she died before the end of the war.
The remarkable and heroic stories of these three famous female spies, their close relationships with each other and with their colleagues, and the sacrifices they made, is a lot to pack into a single movie, but A Call to Spy is a worthy attempt. It’s a suspenseful and moving entertainment as well as an inspiring World War II story of women at war. Recommended.
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