Britain Hired a Woman to Trick Its Own Wartime Spies - And One Told Her Almost Everything!

On the 7th of December 1942, a young Belgian man named José Tinchant was waiting in a café in Liverpool. He was training to become a secret agent for Britain's Special Operations Executive, and had been told to meet a contact as part of an undercover training exercise. But instead of the man he was expecting, a young woman approached him and introduced herself as Christine Collard, a French journalist.

She explained that she had been asked to help him, and José apparently saw no reason to be suspicious. They spent much of the day together, drinking coffee in cafés, going to the cinema and eventually having dinner. Unfortunately for José, his new acquaintance wasn't quite who she claimed to be.

Her real name was Marie Christine Chilver, and she was working for British intelligence under the codename Agent Fifi. Her job was to find out whether trainee spies could keep their secrets when approached by someone they thought they could trust. And José wasn't doing particularly well!

By the end of the day, he had revealed details about his background, training and intended mission in Belgium. Marie reported everything to her superiors. José had previously been regarded as a promising trainee, but following her report, the SOE ended his employment.

Marie had quite an interesting background herself. Born in London in 1920, she grew up in Latvia before travelling to Paris to study. After the German occupation of France, she was interned at Besançon, but managed to escape and eventually reached Britain in 1941, having helped a wounded British airman along the way.

British intelligence initially had doubts about her story, but after questioning her, they recognised that she possessed some rather useful skills. In 1942, she began working for the Special Operations Executive, testing the men and women who hoped to operate behind enemy lines.

She travelled around wartime Britain, meeting unsuspecting trainees in hotels, cafés and restaurants. Some managed to keep their mouths shut, while others were surprisingly willing to discuss things they really should have kept to themselves.

Her work remained largely unknown for decades, until her secret wartime files were made public in September 2014.

For the unfortunate José, one friendly afternoon in Liverpool had been enough to bring his career as a secret agent to an end.

Image info:

Don't Forget That Walls Have Ears! (1942), by Cyril Kenneth Bird, known as Fougasse. British Ministry of Information. Australian War Memorial, reference ARTV02448. Public domain.