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beautiful courier whose looks would cost her her life. She was now the only member of the PROSPER network still at liberty, apart from Déricourt. Khan reported to London that she could no longer contact any members of the network. One can imagine the loneliness and fear she must have felt, stranded in an enemy-occupied country, knowing that so many people had been betrayed, and that some of them must have given her description, under torture or otherwise, to Gestapo officers. Déricourt tried unsuccessfully to persuade her to return to Britain. Was her refusal to go because she suspected he would hand her over to the Germans after bringing her to the landing field? We shall never know because she was betrayed and arrested on 13 October. Thereafter, the only concrete record of her existence is a sad little plaque at Dachau concentration camp, recording the deaths of Khan and three other SOE women agents on 13 September 1944, allegedly after a near-lethal beating meted out for his personal pleasure by the sadistic AllgemeineSS officer Friedrich Wilhelm Rupert, later executed for this and other crimes.
    That date was over two months after the deaths of Andrée Borrel and three other women agents at Natzwiller concentration camp in Alsace, as recorded on an equally sad plaque that was affixed to the camp crematorium there and is now in the memorial museum. Why the delay? Presumably because the women at Dachau were being interrogated for longer than the other four.
    As Nacht und Nebel prisoners were destined to vanish without trace, the women at Natzwiller ceased administratively to exist. It was later discovered that they were taken individually to the sick bay on the evening of 6 July 1944, told to undress on the pretence that it was for an inoculation against typhus and then given what should have been an instantly lethal injection of phenol by the camp medical officer SS Untersturmführer Dr Werner Röhde or his assistant. Within minutes their bodies were shoved into the four-body camp crematorium by Hauptscharführer Peter Schraub. At least one of the women recovered consciousness sufficiently to scar Schraub’s face with her fingernails before being forced inside and the door slammed, so that she was burned alive. When Buckmaster’s assistant Vera Atkins, who made it her personal mission after the war to trace what had happened to the lost women agents, interviewed Schraub three months later, his face still bore the scars. 5
    After the Gestapo wound up PROSPER with the exception of Déricourt and Khan, London continued to receive radio transmissions from Norman. Although the ‘hand’ of the sender was his, the SOE officer responsible for codes and ciphers was convinced that these messages were being sent under German control. Refusing to share this view, Bodington volunteered to go to France and check out the situation on the ground. Given his knowledge of all the Section F networks, this was an incredible lapse of security. Although equipped with his cyanide pill, who could be sure he would use it on capture? Or, did he know of Déricourt’s deal with Boemelburg, which made him as safe in France as he would have been in London?
    Parachuted from an RAF Hudson on the night of 23 July, he was welcomed by Déricourt in a field near Soucelles, between Angers and Le Mans. According to his debriefing on return to Britain by Lysander on 17 August, he and Agazarian tossed a coin to decide which of them should go to an address Norman had given as his safe house in Paris. The coin-tossing was an unnecessary embroidery since, given the risk that it was a trap, it was logical for Bodington, as the senior officer, to order the less well-informed Agazarian to go. He was arrested at the house and tortured over a six-month period in the Gestapo wing of Fresnes prison before being deported to Flossenburg concentration camp in Bavaria. Although not designated an extermination camp, one in three prisoners died there.
    At this stage the