The archetypal World War II spy is a hardened, ruthless operative, yet the most wanted British agent in Nazi-occupied Paris was a shy, harp-playing children’s book author and committed pacifist. This episode profiles Noor Inayat Khan, the first female wireless operator sent into occupied France by Britain’s Special Operations Executive. Born in Moscow in 1914 to an Indian Sufi teacher descended from Tipu Sultan and an American mother, she was gentle, dreamy, and devoted to nonviolence.

Her SOE training reports were disastrous, with instructors calling her clumsy and unsuited to deception, but her leaders saw conviction and her remarkable Morse code skill. As the Prosper network collapsed around her, she refused evacuation and became the only radio operator left in Paris, doing the work of six. Betrayed and captured, she attempted escape twice, was shackled in solitary confinement for ten months, and gave up no colleagues before her execution at Dachau in 1944.

• How a strict pacifist chose to fight the Nazis without killing
• The 40-pound radio set and the six-week life expectancy of operators
• German triangulation vans and her distinctive heavy Morse code fist
• London’s blunder ignoring warnings and trusting faked transmissions
• Her refusal to break, the scratched mess cup, and her final word of liberty