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London’s bustling Baker Street may be known internationally as the street on which the world’s most famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes lived (on 221-B), but the street has its real secrets as well. 64 Baker Street may look today like a regular lighting shop, but over the entrance one can see the green plaque put up recently by Westminster Council. For it was this building that served as the headquarters of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the secret organisation set up by Churchill during World War II to “set Europe ablaze”.

It would have been one of the sites that Noor Inayat Khan, the secret agent, would have visited quite often. In the offices upstairs, she would have received her codes and instructions and it was here that her files – marked TOP SECRET – would have been stored. Another secret location used by the SOE was an address a few hundred metres away: an apartment building called Orchard Court on Portman Square. Here in this luxury flat, where the walls were covered with maps of France and Paris, she would have had her final briefing before her departure. Noor would have been handed over her false passport, papers and a set of four pills, including the lethal cyanide pill, in case she was captured. In the shadowy world of the secret service, Noor Inayat Khan would have moved in and out of unmarked buildings, doing work that even her family had no knowledge of.

It was a world far removed from her tradition and culture. The daughter of a Sufi priest, she was also the direct descendant of Tipu Sultan, the eighteenth century ruler of Mysore. Born in Moscow, she grew up in London and Paris and wanted to be a writer of children’s stories. But as war broke out in Europe, she and her brother decided to leave Paris and go to England to volunteer for the war effort. She joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force but was soon recruited by the SOE as she was fluent in French and had been trained as radio operator. The gentle harp-playing Noor was an unlikely spy, but she was determined to play her role as she was principally opposed to Hitler’s occupation of France and his treatment of the Jews.

In the summer of 1943 she was flown to Paris under the code name of Madeleine. She worked in one of the most dangerous areas in the field and would have survived the war if she had not been betrayed. Her address was sold to the Nazis for 100,000 francs and she was captured, tortured and eventually executed at Dachau Concentration camp. She revealed nothing till the end, not even her real name. For her bravery she was posthumously awarded the George Cross by Britain and France awarded her the Croix de Guerre.

A bronze statue of Noor Inayat Khan will be unveiled in Gordon Square in London in 2012. It is the perfect place for a memorial for Noor as she lived on 4 Taviton Street (now part of the University of London) just off the square. She would often sit in the Square on her off-days reading a book, or she would walk down to the British Museum. As a child she had lived on 1 Gordon Square and played in the park with her siblings. Her father, the Sufi preacher Hazrat Inayat Khan, would often sit under a cherry tree in the Square. 

Noor’s Webley pistol is housed in the Imperial War Museum which has recently received material from the estates of Noor’s friend and biographer, Jean Overton Fuller. A portrait of Noor painted by Jean’s mother, Violet Overton Fuller, has also been given to the Imperial War Museum.

Noor’s name can be found on the Memorial Gates at the top of Constitution Hill – built to commemorate the five million Commonwealth soldiers who volunteered in the two World Wars. Her name is also on a plaque at St Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge which has the names of the women SOE agents who died in the Second World War.

Her secret service papers are kept at the National Archives in Kew and have been declassified since 2003. The file includes her personal letters, training reports and telegrams sent from the field.

The bronze statue at Gordon Square – to be sculpted by Karen Newman – will be the first memorial to an Asian woman in London. It will bring Noor back to Gordon Square, near the house from where she left on her fatal mission and where her family received the news of her death. It will ensure that her sacrifice is never forgotten.