Phyllis Latour

Phyllis "Pippa" Latour MBE (8 April 1921 – 7 October 2023) was a South African-born British agent who served in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II. Born to a French father and British mother, her early life was marked by tragedy, including her father's death in the Belgian Congo and her mother's death from a haemorrhage. She later lived with relatives in Kenya and England before joining the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in 1941. Fluent in French, she was recruited by SOE for espionage work in occupied France. Latour parachuted into Normandy on 1 May 1944 as part of the Scientist circuit, using the codename Genevieve. She worked as a wireless operator with Claude de Baissac and his sister Lise, transmitting coded messages to guide Allied bombing missions. Posing as a teenage girl, she evaded detection by concealing her codes in a hair tie and once escaped capture by claiming to have scarlet fever. Her work lasted until August 1944 when she was briefly detained by American forces before returning to England. After the war, Latour married an engineer and lived in Kenya, Fiji, Australia, and New Zealand. She kept her wartime activities secret until 2000 and became the last living female SOE agent who served in France during WWII. She received the MBE in 1945 and was honored as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 2014. Latour died at 102 in 2023, leaving behind a legacy documented in her biography *The Last Secret ...