THE LAST SECRET AGENT: My Life as a Spy Behind Nazi Lines, once there were Giants...very short ones

THE LAST SECRET AGENT: My Life as a Spy Behind Nazi Lines
PIPPA LATOUR with Jude Dobson
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: After decades of silence, the last surviving World War II British spy reveals the real, untold story of her time as a secret agent in the deadly world of Nazi France.

From a unique and singular voice comes the incredible true story of the last surviving undercover British female operative in WW2. Pippa Latour parachuted into occupied France in 1944 to conduct sabotage and subversion behind enemy lines. Selling soap to German soldiers and hiding codes on a piece of ribbon, she sent back crucial information about troop positions in the lead up to D-Day, and continued her work until Paris was liberated. From her childhood as an orphan in South Africa to her years as an undercover agent, Pippa's story is that of a woman determined to honor her principles and risk her life to fight against the greatest evil of the 20th century.

The Last Secret Agent is a posthumously published memoir, co-written with journalist Jude Dobson. Pippa was decorated highly for her actions, including being made a Member of the Order of the British Empire and receiving the Légion d’Honneur in France. For years, Pippa kept her involvement in the war effort secret from everyone, including her family, but for the first time, her story can now be told in full.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It makes me sad that Pippa Latour did not live to see her story told publicly at long last. Sh desreved to be here to hear, if not necessarily accept, our kudos. She was a modest person, and I suspect suffered from some terrible PTSD based on what I read in this book; that's not a person likely to want to stand in fromt of a room full of applauding people. Never mind she deserves the plaudits. Never mind she was angered by online misinformation about the realities of WWII. She did what she did, honored her Official Secrets Act duty, and lived the life she helped make safe for herseld and millions of others.

I salute you, Ma'am. (Royal address use deliberate.)

From her African colonial childhood, where she picked up practical and communication skills easily, to her European youth, where she put every skill she developed to use, hers was a life of intensities sought, mastered, and used for the purpose she chose to learn them for. This kind of mental toughness and goal-driven living is rare. People like Pippa Latour do not get born often. That she lived until she was 102 is astounding, yet utterly unsurprising. It's our good fortune that she decided to tell her story to a qualified journalist...who filled in gaps that inevitably appear in aging memories...in the trained researcher's best-practices way. (Her specialism is in creating WWII informational films and other materials.) There are reconstructed conversations, unsupported anecdotal statements of fact, and all of that must be okay with the story's best reader. It is, I feel sure, inevitable with the stories of any covert operative.

All the verifiable points check out. I'm not inclined to think someone who told this story at this late date, insisting it be brought to the world's attention after her impending death, would lie. I could be wrong. (It happens to the best of us.) But nothing in her account rings false, as happens with other memoirs. I trust her, I never met her, and isn't that just exactly what a truly skilled covert operative could do in her sleep?

A very powerful story...risking life and sanity to defend strangers' right to freedom of thought and of self-determination...told well. Why then do I dock a fractional star? Because sources aren't cited where they exist, and I'm not really sure which non-conversational (I take it as given that any conversation is the product of memory and imagination) parts aren't sourced or at least grounded in source materials. Much as I understand and accept the reality of a covert operator's limited access to documentation, if this story's appearing at all, the Official Secrets Act applies so it was approved in some fashion. What occurred to make that decision possible?

It's a cavil, but it niggled at me.

The effects of her wartime service on her family? Not delved into, though she explains that her reasons for not speaking of it to her ex-husband and children were grounded in the lingering trauma (my term, not hers) and the need not to breach her oath to keep it zipped up tight. makes perfect sense to me. I would say that, if you're looking for salacious stuff, you move on. Pippa is telling us a story her way. That is not going to be full of gossip.

It is a story we badly need to hear. A woman so small, so frail-looking she could pass as young teen chose to risk torture and death and live among the collaborators and the silently acquiescent to work against a great evil, is a role model to any...all...of us living in this ugly, ugly passage of the 21st century. I'm sorry the late, great lady can't tell me this: Did she see our awful present developing? Is that really what opened her mouth at long last?

It wouldn't surprise me one little bit. She was a shrewd observer and a good judge of character.