Noreen Riols, who has died aged 98, served within the wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE), which coordinated resistance operations behind enemy lines. Her main role lay in training officers for surveillance work by acting as their target. She also acted as a “honey trap” in the final test before agents were sent into the field, trying to seduce them into giving away their mission.
Recruited in 1943, at the age of 17, on the basis of her fluency in French, Riols was too young to be sent into France and was initially employed within F Section, preparing agents to go there. But in February 1944, she was sent to the SOE “finishing school” at Beaulieu in the New Forest, the final stage of every SOE agent’s training course, where a professional burglar taught them how to pick locks, and they were trained in the skills they would need as an agent operating on the ground constantly on the lookout for the enemy surveillance.
