A Life in Secrets Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII

From an award-winning journalist comes this real-life cloak-and-dagger tale of Vera Atkins, one of Britain's premiere secret agents during World War II. As the head of the French Section of the British Special Operations Executive, Vera Atkins recruited, trained, and mentored special operatives whose job was to organize and arm the resistance in Nazi-occupied France. After the war, Atkins courageously committed herself to a dangerous search for twelve of her most cherished women spies who had gone missing in action. Drawing on previously unavailable sources, Sarah Helm chronicles Atkins's extraordinary life and her singular journey through the chaos of post-war Europe. Brimming with intrigue, heroics, honor, and the horrors of war,A Life in Secretsis the story of a grand, elusive woman and a tour de force of investigative journalism. From the Trade Paperback edition.

SARAH HELM has been a journalist for more than twenty years. She was a reporter and feature writer on the Sunday Times before becoming a founding member of the Independent in 1986. She was the Independent's Diplomatic Editor and later became the Middle East and then European Correspondent for the same paper. Sarah Helm is the recipient of the British Press Award of Specialist Writer of the Year and was awarded the Laurence Stern Fellowship by the Washington Post. She lives in London, England.