A CALL TO SPY
Three incredible true stories, mashed together in one tale
Director: Lydia Dean Pilcher Starring: Sarah Megan Thomas, Radhika Apte, Stana Katic Country: UK, France Released: 2019 01
The film follows three prominent women in the SOE: Vera Atkins, Virginia Hall and Noor Inayat Khan. While as assistant (and later head of) F Section Atkins would’ve known both women, Hall and Khan likely never met as they worked in France two years apart.
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Atkins recruits Hall in the film after a chance meeting in London. Hall was actually directed to the SOE after meeting a friend of Nicolas Bodington in Spain as she made her way out of France in 1940. She’d been driving ambulances for the French at the start of the war.
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Hall’s trek through the Pyrenees to escape capture in 1942 is real. The trek through the height of winter took three days and she was actually arrested by the Spanish authorities upon her arrival as she didn’t have the correct papers. She was released after six weeks.
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Noor actually arrived in France in June 1943 and was the only wireless operator in her region for some time. She was betrayed by someone in her network and held by the Nazis for over a year, then killed at Dachau. The film gets these later details mostly correct.
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As in the film, Atkins attracted scrutiny in SOE likely because of her Romanian birth, but kept her role thanks to the F Section chief. As in the film, she was granted citizenship and rank as a Flight Lt in the WAAF, but the timings are a little off.