Sean Rayment - Tales from the Special Forces Club

‘At the beginning of their training the agents were a bit ham-fisted. They would often stand very close to me, or if I was looking in a shop window then they would come and look in the window one shop along, but I wouldn’t go, and in the end they would have to move on. And if they stopped to tie a shoelace – which usually wasn’t undone – then I would know that I had got my man.

‘There was a big department store called Plummers which I would often head straight for. I’d make for the ladies’ lingerie department, and of course none of the men would like walking around that particular department. The students would come in following me and 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. After that I would saunter up a few steps towards the lift and press the lift button. The target would then do one of two things: either he would get in the lift with me, or he would race up to the floor of the button I had pressed so he could continue following me. If he did that, I would quickly rush out of the lift and run down the stairwell by the side of the lift, and this is where my basket would come in useful, because I would whip off my headscarf and my mackintosh and put them in the basket, so all of a sudden I looked like someone different, and by the time he realised what had happened I had disappeared.

‘Once I had gone through the door and was outside, that was it, he had lost me. Even if he realised what had happened, by the time he got outside I was gone. It was tremendous fun and, although in many respects it was a bit of a game, it was also deadly serious. You couldn’t have an agent who stuck out like a sore thumb, either because he was just being clumsy or because he was being too suspicious, so the trick was to act as normally as possible and to try and blend in. There were some who were very good. In some cases you would report back and say, “He didn’t turn up,” and the instructors would say, “Ah, but she did.”

‘One of the other key skills an agent had to be adept at was using “live” and “dead” letterboxes – the passing of messages. A message might read: “Somebody will be sitting on a bench in the pier gardens about 11pm or 3pm and he’s got a message for you,” and you’d have to hope that somebody else, not a person taking part in the exercise, hadn’t got on the bench too, because that could be a bit confusing.

‘You’d be told that the contact would be reading a newspaper, so you would go and sit down and take out a cigarette – I’ve never been smoker but I didn’t mind puffing away – and he would fold up the paper and put it down and I would pick it up, and that was quite normal because there were very few papers published and it was first come, first served, and everyone wanted to read a paper, so if you saw a paper lying around you always picked it up.

‘We would also pass messages in cinemas and tea rooms, which was quite difficult because you had to make sure you found the right person, especially if you were a woman. If you started passing messages to a strange man you could be had up for soliciting, so you had to make sure you were giving the messages to the right person.’

Noreen also had to become proficient at the so-called ‘honey trap’, a tactic in which female agents use their feminine allure to ‘convince’ enemy agents to confess or at least admit their activities. It was a demanding task, not least because if Noreen was successful it might mean the end of an agent’s career even before it had begun. Curiously, some male agents did give some indication that they were involved in covert activities, often within just an hour or so of meeting Noreen.

‘During this stage of the training we would work very closely with the students’ conducting officer. He wasn’t part of the Beaulieu staff, instead his job was to act as a sort of mother hen to the students, giving them a bit of inspiration when needed but also listening to their troubles and soothing their fears, reassuring them, when needed, that they were up to the task and also explaining the risks of the job. I think that certainly some of the students, as time went on and news came in of field agents who had been captured and killed, would think about their own mortality – that was only natural. There was nothing wrong with agents worrying about being killed; at the very least it demonstrated that they had grasped the reality of what they were about to do.

‘Of most concern, however, were agents who might talk or give away what they were up to, either by boasting or through fear or torture, and who might display characteristics which would ultimately compromise their role. The conducting officer would sit in on various exercises and watch the students, and he would pick out anybody he thought might be likely to talk. This wasn’t a test which all of them had to pass. He would approach one who he thought might be a bit suspect and say, “Let’s go out for a drink, or dinner or something – you’ve been working hard and deserve a bit of a break.” He would often do this to students, so there was nothing that unusual in it.

‘Together, the conducting officer and I would act out a couple of different scenarios which we had worked out beforehand, planning down to quite a lot of detail. One was known as the Royal Bath Dinner, named after the hotel where we often worked. I also worked at the Lincoln Hotel, but I preferred the Royal Bath because it had a terrace off the dining room and if there was a full moon shining on to the sea it was very romantic and much easier for me to work.

‘The two men would go off and have dinner and I would wander into the dining room out of the blue and the conducting officer would say, “Oh, Noreen, what are you doing in Bournemouth? How lovely to see you.” He would explain that I was some old friend of the family or something believable and would then ask me to stay for dinner. And the three of us would chat for a while and then someone would come along and say to the conducting officer, “Sir, there is a phone call for you” or something like that, and he would return and say, “I’m frightfully sorry, I’ve been called away, but you two stay here and have some fun and if I can I’ll come along and join you later.” And that’s how it began.

‘We had another scenario where he would say to one of the agents, “I met a girl today, I used to be at school with her brother, and I’ve invited her to join us for a drink.” And the students never minded. Well, the Brits minded a bit, because they were looking forward to a good old boozy evening and along came this blasted woman who was going to spoil everything. But agents with other nationalities were very accommodating, they quite liked it because they didn’t get the chance to meet many English women, so they were quite pleased.

‘I found that the Brits didn’t talk much. My job was to try and get them to talk. The Brits were very stuffy and came out with a series of stories without actually saying anything. One told me that he was a representative for a toothpaste company, which was a bit daft because we didn’t have any toothpaste, we used to clean our teeth with soot or salt. They pretended they were all sorts of things, but the most obvious excuse they gave was that they were on a very boring course with the War Office. The clever ones would always try and steer the subject of conversation back to me, so that I had to talk about myself or what I did, so I had to be careful too.

‘But the foreign agents were different, especially the younger ones. I think they were lonely, they were often far from their families and their culture – it was isolating for them. It must have been very flattering for them to have a young English girl chatting away to them, hanging on their every word. I remember one, a Dane, a beautiful blond Adonis. I managed to get him out on to the terrace – he didn’t need a lot of persuading actually, I think he was rather taken with me. I weighed about 18 kilos less then, and didn’t have white hair, and I didn’t need glasses in those days.