The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Two Secret Agenda and Their Untold Love Story

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

Ahead of the 80th anniversary of D-Day, journalist and author, Nahlah Ayed tells the story of two elite agents working for Britain's Special Operations Executive in France during the Second World War. "The War We Won Apart" is constructed from hours of unpublished interviews and archival and personal documents to recount the love story of a British woman, Sonia Butt and a French-Canadian soldier, Guy d'Artois who fought the war apart.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From epic camping trips to scenic local hikes, spending time outdoors is a great way to create lasting memories to share with friends and family. This summer, TVO is celebrating the natural wonders that inspire unforgettable adventures with great documentaries, articles, and learning resources about beloved parks in Ontario and beyond. Visit tvo.me slash Ontario summer stories for all this and more. And be sure to tell us your stories for a chance to win great prizes. Help TVO create a better world through the power of learning. Visit TVO.org and make a tax-deductible donation today. Journalist and author Nala Ayyad tells the love story of two agents, one British, one French-Canadian,

working for Britain's Special Operations Executive in France during the Second World War. It's all told in compelling detail in her new book. It's called The War We Won Apart, the untold story of two elite agents who became one of the most decorated couples of World War II. two elite agents who became one of the most decorated couples of World War II. And it brings Nala Ayed to our studio. And the first thing we established in the green room before coming out here is we've never met before. We have not met before, which feels actually strange. It feels kind of...

I feel like we've met before. Well, I mean, we both sort of do the same thing in the same city for a long time. And yet this is the first time. So it's long overdue. It's great to meet you. Yes, indeed. Lovely to meet you. Yes, indeed. It's great to meet you finally. Lovely to meet you. Thanks for having me.

If you told me that you were doing a story about a couple that was involved in a war, I would immediately be thinking, okay, she met them in Afghanistan or she met them in Iraq. I'm pretty sure you didn't cover World War II firsthand, so the first question's kind of obvious. How did you find this story? Yeah, I have to give all credit to our producer at the time in London, Stephanie Jenser, who, you know, we were there in London as a correspondent there. Every year we did a story

about D-Day. We would mark the anniversary, we'd go to Normandy. And that particular year was the 75th anniversary. So it was a big anniversary five years ago. She came with Sonia's story and said, would you like to do this story? I said, well, I've been here for seven years or so, and I had never done a woman's story for D-Day. It was always men, and it was always men often who landed on the beaches, and the many heroes who walked in on D-Day and did the hard work that liberated France. And so that's how the story came to me initially. But then I was taken with the story of Sonia. So she is, you know, she's both a combatant and a civilian.

And she's a fighter, but she's also a victim in the story. And so after we did the piece, we had such a reaction from people, women, people from all walks of society, but especially women wrote and said, how is it that we don't know about Sonia D'Artois? And I remember many times lying there at night thinking about what she did and how I wanted to know more. And then I realized also

that there was a bigger story to Sonia. Her husband is also a story, an amazing story, all on his own. So the two together, I just couldn't get them out of my mind. And so I called up the family again and I said, has anyone thought about writing a book about this? And she said, many times, but no one has. And here we are five years later, and that's how it happened. And I have to say, just to add to what you said, a great introduction to the idea, but I've always done, I've always been interested in stories about war and conflict and immigration, and specifically women in conflict. So I've done hundreds of stories about women in conflict, different roles, different hats in conflict, in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and Europe and Ukraine, you know, Crimea, all those places.

But in your lifetime. But over time, exactly. And so this actually fits right in. Even though I didn't cover this conflict, even though, sadly, I never met this couple, it fits entirely, in my opinion, with the body of work that I had before. It's interesting that you,

and this may reflect the fact that we are different genders, but you see this more as Sonia's story, and I looked at it more as the couple's story. Yeah. Well, it began with Sonia. I think that's why. But I agree with you 100%. In fact, I've been trying to talk some more about Guy, because everyone wants to know about Sonia. And she's, you know, she's there from the beginning to end. He's not. He passes away a bit earlier than Sonia. And there's a coda to Sonia's story, which I'm not going to give away here, that kind of takes us into another decade of her life. But it is very much a story of two people.

And that's actually how the book is constructed as well. We should also say, Sonia is not exactly somebody who sat behind a desk and filled out paperwork during World War II. Sonia killed people. She did. She started out filing papers. It's actually that, her boredom with that, that got her to the Special Operations Executive, which, as you know, is a secret army that was created,

literally, to undermine German occupation from within. And so ordinary people were trained to do extraordinary things, to kill, as you say, to be able to silently kill people, to be able to silently break into an office and grab documents that are needed for whatever reason, to be able to sabotage a rail line or to cut a highway. And so these skills, you know, this is what Sonia learned to do. And it was because she was bored with the paperwork, because that was her job with the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. She went to her father, who was in the Air Force, and said, can you help me find something more interesting to do? And this is what she ended up doing, is joining a secret army. How difficult is it to write a book about two people you've never met?

Incredibly difficult. Incredibly difficult. I am, as you mentioned, you know, my career was built on traveling the world and talking to people, seeing things for myself. I liked bearing witness in person. And so I had to really change the way I thought about journalism because, make no mistake, this is still a journalistic enterprise. To me...

I mean, the end notes, you've got dozens of pages ofnotes in the back, so I know it's well sourced. Yeah, and I needed to know that what I was putting in print was as close as possible to the real story as I could get, given the fact that I couldn't talk to these people. I couldn't talk to any of the players, actually, but many of them had left memoirs behind, or half-memoirs, or snippets of paper with their memories. Or kids. Or kids. Or kids who remember the stories. And I'd like to talk about that again in a minute.

But the great thing about this is that Sonia, her daughter, had her do an interview, several hours worth, all recorded. And so I got to listen. And again, maybe this might explain why Sonia keeps coming up, because I feel closer to her because I got to hear her voice and hear her describe what she had been through in all those years. You know, as though I was asking her questions. I had so many follow ups, but I couldn't ask them. Sheldon, if you would, top of page two, let's bring this graphic up.

We're going to do a quote from the book. Here's an excerpt. All along, Guy had no idea about Sonia's whereabouts, whether she was safe or even alive. He went to sleep every night worrying about her. Sonia had been his wife for only six weeks. Beyond the SOE, the Special Operations Executive Training Houses, and the hotel room they shared as newlyweds, they never lived together. But they had seen each other virtually every day for nearly six months. Now they were fighting the same war, but were worlds apart. How does this married couple's relationship survive?

World War II, big absences, like significant things that happened to both of them and that they perpetrated themselves over this period of time. It's such a great question. over this period of time? It's such a great question. I truly believe from what I've seen and heard of their relationship is that it really was the real thing. There was a lot of love between them.

I had the privilege of looking at the family archive, lots of documents that are kept, I mean, meticulously filed and organized. And some of that included letters between the two of them. Because after the war, they were separated quite a bit. So when I say they fought, you know, the war, they won apart. It wasn't just the Second World War. Their whole life was a battle.

And much of it they spent separately. Because he was a military man. He stayed in the military and he was away often. For long stretches of time. For long stretches of time. I mean, he was in Korea for a whole year. And lots of drama ensued there as well, and very worrying things. And so they lived apart.

But I had the privilege of having a small glimpse into their love affair. And it was in letters that they wrote to each other. And, you know, very short little letters, sometimes daily. And they would number them and date them. And I really got a sense of how they regarded each other, how much they cared about each other. I think that's a big part of it. The other is also is in, during the war, there was an interruption to their relationship.

Obviously they didn't know where they were, where each other was and what they were doing and who they were with. Or if they were alive. Or if they were even alive. And when the war was over, Sonia was adamant about living up to her marriage vows, even though there was an interruption. I was just going to say.

Yeah, please. Well, I mean, she fessed up to this. She had an affair early in the marriage. She did. And it was, you know, under the circumstances of, as you say, this was a world war. And, you know, they were surrounded by Germans. They didn't know if they would live from one minute to the next. And so this is the circumstance under which she did have an affair. And then at the end of, when France is liberated and she's reunited with her husband, she immediately fesses up.

And she says, I need to make this up to my husband. I made, you know, I made my marriage vows and I want to live up to them. She watched her own parents go through a difficult relationship. It was ruptured when she was three. And there were a lot of consequences to that. So that very much, and I know this from listening to her on tape, very much influenced the way she regarded marriage. And although she had that love affair under very difficult circumstances,

she was adamant about making it up to her husband. And somehow, we will never know how. We'll never know what the conversations were like, how they got past that. But they did. Because again, as I say, I read it in the letters. You could see and hear the love between them. And they made it to the finish line. They made it to the finish line. They did. Despite all the challenges. One of the couple's kids, obviously they made it to the finish line. They made it to the finish line, despite all the challenges. One of the couple's kids, obviously,

was essential to your telling the story, Nadia Murda. Tell us about that. Sure. Nadia was, when we did this story, it was because Sonia was featured at the Juneau Beach Center. There was a whole setup,

a display of her work and some of her personal effects. And we went over to Normandy and we met the family and Nadia was the person I interviewed and also the next generation. But there was an instant connection because you could tell how much she cared about telling the story of her family.

This, I think, is not an understatement that for her it was a lifelong dream that there's a book written about her parents. And so, Nadia was my primary source. She carried much of her mother's memories. She knew her mother very well. She's the eldest girl in the family, very close to her mom. Six kids?

Six children. Three boys and three girls. Perfect symmetry. Sonia was barefoot and pregnant a lot. A lot. For the better part of a decade. Yeah. Yeah. Sonia was barefoot and pregnant a lot. A lot. For the better part of a decade. Yeah. Yeah.

And so, which made her life very difficult. It had a lot of health effects and all that. So Nadia was essential to telling the story. And because it was a journalistic exercise, I mean, it's a very fraught, it could be a very fraught relationship. But, you know, a huge thanks to Nadia for giving me the distance and appreciated the journalistic process and never tried to influence what I wrote. She just enabled my access to material, and she was always available when I had questions.

And, of course, she provided that interview, which was an incredible glimpse, a firsthand glimpse into Sonia and her personality. Well, you did kind of anticipate my next question, which is when you have somebody who's that close to one of the people you're writing about, it would be understandable if they wanted to influence how you portrayed their mother. And you're saying she did not try to do that? No, she did not. No. In

fact, I mean, I was worried because, you know, this story meanders quite a bit. There are a lot of challenging situations. There are a lot of difficult moments. No one is perfect. Even heroes can be flawed. And so I was worried about that reaction. And, you know, you'll have to ask the family for their entire assessment. But from what I've understood so far is that Nadia is just, and the family is very happy that the story has been told. To her, this was something she owed her parents, that she knew her parents wanted this. Her father, Guy d'Artois, who we need to talk some more about, wanted to write his own book. He actually was amassing all this material.

He kept photographs. He had things photographed on the ground in France, all with the idea eventually to write something. And he never wrote the book, but he did buy a typewriter with the intention to do it. And so all of this was sort of hanging in the background. This is a family that wanted this story told. And I kind of walked in on this amazing story and had the privilege of being trusted to write this story.

Well, okay, let's talk about Guy. Now, this is a guy who's not got what you might call sort of the typical housewife of the day, right? He is married to a pretty extraordinary person. Yes. How did he handle all of that? Yeah. The insight into that that I got was the interviews he did when he returned from the war. Because he, for lots of logistical reasons, he crossed the ocean first and then she followed a little bit later, a few days later. So when he arrived, there was press coverage immediately because Canadians at that stage did not know that there were fellow Canadians in France ahead of D-Day.

I mean, that made front-page headlines. So that was a huge headline. He was one of the people who was interviewed repeatedly for that story. And in the telling of his story and his colleagues, because he arrived with five other or six other men who had done the same thing as he did, many of them, most of them French Canadians, obviously, he started talking about Sonia.

He started telling her story, and the press couldn't believe it. You could see the incredulity and the excitement about this romantic war story. And they knew she was coming on a ship, you know, a few days later. And so when she arrived, there was a whole horde of press waiting to talk to her. But anyway, so going back to your question, the reason I know that he was proud of what she did is because of what he said about her in those first few interviews.

He talked about, somebody asked him, you know, how did you fall in love or why would you fall in love? He says, she's beautiful. She's very brave. She's courageous. You know, why wouldn't I have loved her? I mean, of course I fell in love with her because she was so courageous. So it was clear he was always proud about, from everything I read, he was very proud of what she did.

Here's where I'm going to do a yes, but, comma. Yes. Yes, that was all as it relates to World War II. Yeah. But after the war was over. Yeah. They very, if I read this properly, they very quickly became kind of a typical couple where he had the job. Right. And she had the kids. And it was her obligation to sort of put all of the excitement of her previous wartime experiences behind her. Yeah. And assume the role of a typical wife and mother of the day, which was kind of unfair to her, don't you think? I would think, yes. That's the sense that I had. And you're very observant. I think she herself put herself in that position as well.

She was, she, my understanding is, and my sense is, that she did this partly in deference to her husband, that she did not want in deference to her husband, that she did not want to overshadow his story. Which must have been difficult for her. It must have been difficult, but also my sense is that she very willingly did that, because she felt, I think she was also disappointed by some of the coverage of their story. I think there was a lot of evidence that she was being treated kind of like an exotic thing and that her efforts weren't appreciated as much as the fact that she was a pretty woman who dropped in behind enemy lines and didn't appreciate the hard work that she did. That she parachuted, you know, alone behind enemy lines, that she had to teach a bunch of men she didn't know how to use weapons, you know, men who didn't respect her because she was a young woman, 20 years old. She had just

turned 20. It's amazing. It is. And so I think she was disappointed in the way her story was treated, and she was very wary about upstaging her husband. So she made the difficult choice to sort of blend into the background. And you're right. She did play a very traditional role. Although, if you talk to the family, you get a sense that she really was in charge where it came to the background. And you're right. She did play a very traditional role. Although if you talk to the family, you get a sense that she really was in charge where it came to the house. Oh, there's no question about that, particularly since he was away for such long stretches of time. And you can imagine, and I've heard this from lots of other people, when the husband is on the road and then comes home and tries to assume, I'm the man of my castle again and say, well, wait a

second, you haven't been here for a year. I don't think it works that way. Yeah. And in fact, there is a part of the book where I talk about that, where she, you know, yeah, they have to bring him back into the fold where she's been in charge, she pays the bills, she takes the kids to hockey and to ballet and all those things. And suddenly he shows up and there are different rules. And there's actually one part that I find really interesting where she decided to learn how to drive, to kind of, you know, augment her independence. He put a stop to it when he came back. And so she had to do it secretly. She actually continued with the lessons without telling him and just went ahead and learned how to drive. And when she decided to take on a job,

there was also consternation. So there was, it appears to be some tension. And don't forget the times. And we're talking about the 40s and 50s and 60s. That was a time when society imposed those pressures as well. It was not typical for women to be in combat. It was not typical for women to upstage their husbands. I'm sure there were many examples, but it was not the typical way of living. And so all of that led to Sonia

kind of receding into the background while Guy continued, you know, with some incredible feats also of other things beyond the war where he made headlines as well. Well, let me pick up on that because here's the initial assessment as you've got it in the book from the special operations executive who described Sonia as, quote, very nice, very popular, but anxious from motives of romance. What does that mean? It's so judgmental. I really, I read all of those assessments in her file, which was really provided so much information. I loved going through the file because I learned so much about how they were regarded. And women,

if you read some of the literature out there on the SOE and the women's participation in it, they were often judged and seen it through a different lens than the men were. My sense is, and other historians have written about the SOE, is that many of those instructors didn't like having to train women for these jobs and didn't want women to be involved in the SOE. And on the other hand, it was also a rite of passage for SOE trainees to fall in love with each other I mean these are a bunch of young people hanging out you know in close quarters and it inevitably happened and so I believe that's what that was a comment on because Sonia was very popular she was and she was a beautiful woman and several of the people she trained with

fell in love with her and and you know to to no conclusion. But Guy was the man who ultimately she married. I don't know how much you want to say about this, but we should probably touch on it. She had been sexually assaulted during the course of her military experience by two German officers. Do we know how she got through all that? Yeah. It's a very difficult story, as you can imagine. Yeah. It's a very difficult story, as you can imagine. And she had not talked about it publicly. It was mentioned in her file. It was actually mentioned and cited as a reason for which she deserved to be recognized, because despite that horrific incident, she continued and did more work.

At that stage, she was actually helping the American forces by providing information, traveling across lines and providing information about German positions and that kind of thing, which is a very different role than what she started out in. But she, it's a great question. I don't know how she summoned the strength and the resilience to continue. But I think, again, my sense is that she was so devoted to the job that she had, and she knew it was an important job. And she knew that she had to complete it with success, and that the success meant not just her own achievement, but actually could save the lives and help, you know, thousands of other soldiers who were on the ground. And so I believe

that's what pulled her through. And I imagine, like many women of her generation, she suffered in silence. You just didn't talk about it 75 years ago. Absolutely. Yeah, it was, I think, again, I'll leave it for the readers, but it was hard to talk about this with her family. And it was hard to obviously talk about it with her loved ones. So she does talk about it in the interview,

and that's the source of my information about it with her loved ones. So she does talk about it in the interview, and that's the source of my information about it, is this recorded interview that her daughter arranged. She does go into some detail about it and describe the situation. Yeah. I'm going to talk to the director again for a second. Sheldon, quote board number two, please. Let's do another excerpt from the book,

The War We Won Apart. Sonia occasionally joined in. She had no qualms about firing at the convoys. She even admitted enjoying the rush of it. You just sprayed and killed faceless soldiers. It wasn't personal. It was a task that had to be done. The distance, she admitted, made it easier. But it was a very different story up close. In one encounter involving a German staff car whose exact details are lost to history, Sonia came face to face in the light of day with one of the occupants.

Quote, there was an officer who was still alive. He was aiming at me and I shot him, she said. I shook after that. It was him or me. I shot him in cold blood. I mean, holy smokes. What does that say about her? She had a lot of, she had it in her. There were so many doubts about her abilities, about her ability to work alone, about her ability to be courageous under pressure, but that's proof that she had it in her. She did what she needed to do. under pressure, but that's proof that she had it in her. She did what she needed to do.

It also says that she was well-trained. It was a very short training period, just, I think, maybe three months or so. And that was part of the criticism of the SOE afterwards, that how could you take these ordinary young women and give them three months of training and expect them to be able to operate behind enemy lines? But that story and many others like it show that actually Sonia,

and she says this in the interview, she felt prepared. She felt that she had been trained enough to be able to react in the field. And that's a very good example of it. Well, speaking of being prepared, you are a war correspondent. Not World War II, but you've covered war.

And you know what war's about and you have seen the hell that is war. And I mean, I presume all of that was extremely helpful in telling, admittedly, a story about a different war that took place a long time ago, but it was war. Yeah. Yeah. I listen, again, as you say, Second World War, I don't have a sense of it beyond my reading and, you know, the films that we all watch to get a sense of it. But I, as a foreign correspondent, you know, you inevitably bump up against the Second World War and its legacy. And, you know, I'm stating the obvious, but I've been in the Middle East and Europe and Ukraine, as I said, and Russia and other places. And so it is

constantly in the background. And you're always comparing kind of your experience with those of people who lived through horrible times like that. But, you know, there were very many moments where I could imagine, for example, what it was like for Guy to land in France and watch the plane leave and realize that he had no way out,

that you are now here and this is what you're doing. I remember, and I'm not a soldier, obviously, and I'm not an agent, but I'm a journalist who's had to land in really dangerous places and then watch the plane fly away and realize, wow, I am now here and there's no way out until I get this job done. And so I used some of that to try to approximate what it might have been like for Guy or Sonia to land in a dangerous place, knowing that you could be killed at any moment, just to try to approximate what that might have felt like. And so I used some of my own memories in describing that.

some of my own memories in describing that. Another scene like that is Sonia's driving, you know, driving away from Le Mans when she was working for the Americans. And she describes a scene where she sees kind of, you know, the massive refugees walking away and the people who had been killed, you know, in the last days of the liberation of France. And just that scene, I can almost visualize it

because I've seen scenes like that. Just what it's like to walk out of a war zone and to see the destruction that had been wrought by a withdrawing army. I've seen that. And it's not a pretty sight. So I use that also, those memories, to try to, again, not to make up things,

but to give some sense of what it might have been like for Sonia Enki to be in a war zone. My point is you're the right person to tell the story. I think so. I mean, your background obviously was enormously of value. It dictated my interest as well, right? I find war interesting. I mean, and I do think, if I may, you know, it's my contention that wars never really end. And I say that in the book. They alter our DNA. They change the course of our lives,

and they affect the people generations later. So if it's not unexploded ordnance, as we still find from the First and Second World War, if it's not the scars that we leave on cities when wars happen, then it's memories and trauma that we inherit from people who have been through war. And so war stories, I think, this one included, are a cautionary tale. And they're important to know for us, not just because it's part of our history, but because they tell us who we are. And they not only tell us about what it was like

to live through war, but they also teach us what it takes to find peace. Let's finish up on this. You know, this was a story that is such a compelling story, and yet for a whole bunch of reasons, just wasn't told over the years. I gather there was like a CBC miniseries that was in the works, and that fell through.

And like, for whatever reason, this story just didn't get out there. But now you've got it out there. And I wonder how personally satisfying it is for you to be the person doing it. It's really hard to believe, actually, that it's me. I can't believe that it hadn't been told in its entirety before.

I feel incredibly privileged and lucky to have been able to be trusted enough to come up with this book. And I really think the biggest lesson for me from that, I mean, aside from the fact that it's a cautionary tale about the horrors of war, but also the importance of knowing what these stories are like,

like actually asking our elders and our relatives to tell us those stories because they contain so many lessons for today. We need to document these stories. So I hope this story, my doing this story, inspires other people to tell more of this story, but also to tell the stories of their families because it's part of our history, but it contains lessons we all need to learn. And so go talk to your elders, record your families, you know, talk to your grandpa or grandma and get those stories down because they're important. We need to know them. Great advice. The war we won apart. The untold story

of two elite agents who became one of the most decorated couples of World War II. Nala Ayed, it's so great to meet you finally and to have you here in our studio today. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here. It's been great.