The last secret agent My life as a spy behind Nazi lines

A statement attributed to the Buddha follows that "three things cannot long stay hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth." The Last Secret Agent shows the limit of this assertion. Phyllis "Pippa" Latour kept the secret of her career in Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE), a WWII counterintelligence unit, for decades. Her own children didn't find out until Pippa was in her eighties. Now, it is the rest of the world's turn. Born in South Africa in 1921, Latour moved to England in May 1939 and joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in November 1941. Her fluency in French led to her recruitment by the SOE, and she was deployed to Normandy. Posing as a teenage girl who sold homemade soap, she worked with two other spies, Claude de Baissac and his sister Lise, to transmit encoded messages to SOE headquarters--messages that were vital for identifying enemy targets. More than a wartime tale, the book spans Latour's entire life, giving us detail after rich detail of one of history's most amazing women.

True courage comes in many forms. Latour described her life as "unusual." This is an understatement. She was the last surviving undercover British female agent of the Special Operations Executive in World War II, working as a radio operator in occupied France. She sent details of German troop deployments to London and relayed instructions for Resistance actions. Latour had come to the role through a circuitous path, having traveled extensively before ending up in Britain. Her journeys made her multilingual and allowed her to adapt to different settings. When she was offered a place in the SOE, she jumped at the chance, even though the lifespan of agents in France was often brutal and short. She did well in the job, though, getting around on bicycle on the pretext of selling goat's milk soap. "Don't think of me and my fellow agents as 007 types," she says. "Our job was to disappear, to fit in and not be noticed." She was questioned several times by the Gestapo, but her luck and cover story held. Understandably, she was often scared, and by the war's end, she was traumatized and exhausted. After the war she drifted around the world, eventually settling in New Zealand, where she lived peacefully. Latour kept her past a secret--even from her husband--until one day her eldest son read about her wartime experiences online. Now, with the help of journalist Dobson, she has told her story, as well as those of other female agents. The result is a fascinating read, all the more so because of Latour's humility. Regrettably, she died in 2023, unable to see the finished book. She was 102. A wartime spy's remarkable tale, told in an authentic voice. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.