While her background was very different from Juliet’s, it was the struggles Noor Inayat Khan faced during World War II that inspired THE JULIET CODE.

Born in Moscow to an Indian father and an American mother, Noor spent a large part of her years before the war living in Paris. Her father was a musician and Sufi teacher and a member of Indian Muslim nobility, but he died in 1927, leaving Noor with the responsibility of looking after the family. A sensitive, intelligent young woman and a talented musician, Noor became a child psychologist and a writer and translator of Indian fairytales, before fleeing Paris to England with her family in 1940.

This dreamy, gentle young woman who did not believe in lying hardly seemed suited to the role of spy. But she was passionately opposed to the Nazi occupation of her beloved France and determined to join in the fight against them.

The Special Operations Executive recruited Noor as a wireless operator and instructors did their best to train this very unusual young woman in the art of espionage. It was said that the blast of firearms frightened her and that that her coding and transposition was erratic–sometimes lightning fast and faultless, at others, wildly inaccurate. Leo Marks, the cryptanalyst who prepared Noor for her work in occupied France, went to the trouble of reading Noor’s fairytales to see if he could better explain to her how to make sure her coding worked every time.

Noor landed by Lysander in Northern France and managed to operate for months under the noses of the Germans, until she was betrayed, possibly by the jealous girlfriend of a man who had fallen in love with Noor.

She was taken to the headquarters of German counterintelligence, the Sicherheitsdienst, at a grand house on 84 Avenue Foch. She immediately tried to escape. After another failed escape attempt which involved climbing onto the roof, Noor was labeled a dangerous prisoner and sent to a German prison, where they kept her in shackles.

Despite her gentle disposition, Noor fought her captors viciously and never gave up her contacts or any information to the Germans. Unfortunately, she had left some coded transpositions she had made lying around before her capture. Using those and previous transmissions, the Germans were able to imitate Noor on the airwaves and deceive London headquarters with false information. Each W/T operator has a distinctive way of sending their morse code transmissions–Noor had been nicknamed “Bang Away Lulu” because apparently chilblains had made her heavy-handed on the instrument.

Tragically, Noor was executed by shooting at Dachau prison.

The Nazi policy of “Nacht und Nebel” or “Night and Fog” meant that all agents working behind enemy lines were executed and all records of their existence obliterated, so that no one would know what had happened to them. It took intelligence officer Vera Atkins many months after the war to discover Noor’s fate.

In writing THE JULIET CODE, I wanted to take a character who was flawed and human and examine what happens to such women who survive what Noor went through. Noor Inayat Khan’s story shows there are many kinds of courage in the world and that the most unlikely people can be heroes.