SISTER SPIES

True Spies, Episode 26: Sister Spies

NARRATOR: Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you’ll hear the true stories behind the world’s greatest espionage operations. You’ll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

True Spies, Episode 26: Sister Spies.

PAT OWTRAM: When we started on training courses, the first thing you did was sign the Official Secrets Act. And they did emphasize that this was for life. It wasn't just for the war, but you must, in fact, never divulge what you are about to learn.

NARRATOR: What if the lives of a nation depended on it?

JEAN OWTRAM: The Official Secrets Act was very strict. And the penalties to this day of breaking that act are extremely fierce. And once you signed it, you realized that you couldn't tell your family. We had a cover story. Obviously, we worked with radio but, otherwise, we would never let on that we were intercepting German radios.

NARRATOR: It’s 1942. War rages on almost every continent and 18-year-old spy Pat Owtram is posted to watch over the British coastlines. Her days and nights are spent intercepting secret messages sent by the enemy German Navy to their fleet prowling the North Sea and the English Channel. She has signed the Official Secrets Act that binds her by law to never speak of the clandestine work she is doing in those little camouflaged outposts. She has no idea that at the same time, her younger sister Jean is also a spy, working for the Special Operations Executive in Europe, decoding the encrypted messages sent by the Allied secret agents from their reconnaissance missions behind enemy lines.

JEAN OWTRAM: I was one of the specialists in disruptive messages trying to sort them out, especially in the early hours of the morning. It could well be that somebody was under pressure or someone was approaching with a gun. It could be anything. They were desperate to get material out before they themselves were killed or taken prisoner or something terrible would happen. And you knew that their life is what you were trying to save.

NARRATOR: Bound by the law and fearful of the consequences, for more than 20 years the two sisters would never tell each other about their secret lives during the war. Today, they’ll be your guide to the highly classified intelligence operations that enabled the Allies to win the Second World War and liberate Europe. Now 97 and 95, Pat and Jean were teenagers when it was announced that Britain was at war with Germany. Living in a 15th-century mansion surrounded by the green pastures of Lancashire in the northwest of England, the horrors of what was unfolding on the mainland under the Nazis was a world away. 

JEAN OWTRAM: One Sunday morning when we were on our way to the village church for the service, and we stopped and went into one of the local people's houses, and listened to the declaration of war on the wireless, and then went to the church where the service continued with appropriate prayers and so forth. And I remember feeling good. I'm not going to miss it. I'm going to be part of this. I felt that we had missed all the great events of the past but we will not miss this one. We should, with any luck, be there playing our part. And that was quite exciting. 

NARRATOR: But the adults who’d remembered the first Great War, weren’t as excited as the children.

PAT OWTRAM: I think it was very different for them because in the first war our mother had been in the Women's Land Army. Our father had just got into the Royal Marines. So I think our reaction was very different. I remember my mother saying it was as if the 20 years between the war had never happened and we'd gone straight really from the first war into the second one. They were not nearly as elated and thrilled as we were. They were much more, I think, seriously affected by it. 

NARRATOR: Then a new arrival at their family home put things into perspective for the girls.

PAT OWTRAM: Our grandfather had Austrian refugee cooks and housemaids. I said it in the plural because they didn't always stay very long. But Lily Gatzel came and was his cook. As a refugee, they didn't talk in great detail about what had happened to them. She didn't really tell us very much to begin with. Later on, I do remember her telling me about how I think her sister and sister's family had tried to cross the frontier into Czechoslovakia. I don't think they managed to get out. And there were stories about, really, the brutal occupation by the Nazis of Austria. 

JEAN OWTRAM: Well, obviously, it was a terrifying moment for them, and they had to break free and come over here. They'd been caught. They'd be back in the concentration camps. They didn't want to look back. They wanted to look forward, I think. 

NARRATOR: As well as an insight into what was going on in Austria, Lily also gave the girls the core skill they would need to become World War II spies. 

PAT OWTRAM: Like the other ones who came, she didn't really speak English when she arrived. So Jean and I spent quite a lot of time, particularly on holidays from school, talking with Lily and her colleague Edith Crochmalnik. And lots of the conversation was in German so that we both were pretty well bilingual in English and Austrian-accented German, and we learned a lot about the Nazis and Hitler's occupation of Austria and so on. As it turned out, it was very useful at that time to have the German language.

NARRATOR: Pat and Jean were focused on the moment they could sign up for service, excited by the doors this new skill could open. When she was 18, Pat took the first step on her path to becoming a spy. 

PAT OWTRAM: So, I did a secretarial course and I had a job for six months at a literary agency in London.

NARRATOR: Er, not exactly what I was expecting… It might not have been very cloak and dagger, but moving from the rural safety of Lancashire to the big city Pat got a first taste of the danger she was putting herself in.

PAT OWTRAM: The blitz was going full blast. The housekeeper took me around to show me my bedroom, and that's when the window bulged in like a bubble. All the glass burst and a landmine went off right outside the window. The housekeeper and I shot under the bed and there was glass everywhere. We were all right. It was a German landmine and they used to come down silently by parachute and then explode. So, that was my introduction to London and the Blitz really. 

NARRATOR: Talk about a baptism of fire. 

PAT OWTRAM: At the end of that course, some of us were sent off to a small secret college in Wimbledon and trained to search for and intercept the signals of German naval ships.

NARRATOR: At some point or another, we’ve all wondered what job we would have done had we lived during the war. A pilot? A nurse? A codebreaker? If you fancy the latter, then let’s see if your skills match up.

JEAN OWTRAM: We were required to have pretty fluent German because you never knew what would come up. They considered you. You had to have the right kind of temperament to deal with periods of very intense activity and long periods of nothing happening, which would be very boring. And of course, you'll have to have very good hearing, which at 18 years old you normally would. But they then trained you, and a lot of the messages were going to be in four-letter enigma code.

NARRATOR: Enigma was supposed to be an uncrackable code. The Germans used it to send highly classified military information via the airwaves but it met its match at Bletchley Park - codename Station X - which was the secret home of British codebreaking during the Second World War. There, a crack team that included Alan Turing worked day and night to unlock the secret messages hidden inside the streams of seemingly jumbled-up letters.

PAT OWTRAM: Bletchley Park would need these sent on to them and they had to be absolutely accurate. If you weren't sure of the letter, you would leave a gap but what you never did was to hope you got it right. You would always be very accurate. And of course, we worked around the clock in ‘watches’ as they were called - four hours on, eight hours off - because the German fleet was active at night as well as daytime.

NARRATOR: And the most important requirement for this job was to keep your mouth shut. Keeping the Official Secrets Act means telling no one about what you do, not even your husband, your mother, or your children.

PAT OWTRAM: The penalties to this day of breaking that act are extremely fierce.

NARRATOR: Nowadays, leaking classified government information can land you with a lengthy prison sentence, but during the war, a traitor to Britain could face execution. So, think you could handle that pressure? If you answered ‘yes’ then congratulations. You’re ready for your first assignment. Location: Withernsea, East Yorkshire. Threat level: Moderate. Risk from German bombs dropped during air raids on nearby Hull. Sea mines also pose danger. Posting: St. Leonard’s Hotel, now converted into a secret ‘Y’ station. There, you will find the radios and equipment you need to tune into enemy traffic in the Baltic and North Seas. Good luck. 

PAT OWTRAM: You had to use all your hearing and everything to make out some of these rather faint or corrupted radio signals, and you knew that they could be a matter of life and death. I mean, the German ship could be planning to attack a convoy or they could have been laying mines off the East Coast, which they did. And you were very aware that it was a job that mattered a lot, and at 18 years old you were really very lucky to be used to doing this kind of interception. 

NARRATOR: It was 1943. Pat and the other ‘Y’ station codebreakers were intercepting 3,000 secret German messages every day. Meanwhile back in London, Pat’s younger sister Jean was sitting in a small room in the old vicarage of a church in central London in the middle of an interview. 

JEAN OWTRAM: I had a long interview about things I was doing and interested in and so forth. And then my interviewer said: “You do crossword puzzles?” And I thought: “Oh, yeah. They've run out of suitable questions. I’ve missed my chance here.”

NARRATOR: It sounds like an incongruous question to ask in a job interview but if you’ve seen the movie The Imitation Game, about the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, you’ll remember a scene where cryptanalyst Joan Clark - played by Keira Knightley - turns up to a job interview, only to be sat down to complete a crossword in a room full of others furiously scribbling away. She completes it in record time and is then taken to Bletchley Park to join the other codebreakers deciphering the Enigma code. This was actually how the British War Office found many of its brightest cryptologists during the war. They’d put out particularly challenging crosswords in national newspapers and ask for responses. Crosswords are human ingenuity vs. human ingenuity. It’s lateral thinking about getting inside the mind of the game setter - in the same way, codebreaking is about getting inside the mind of your enemy. So, if you have a penchant for crosswords then maybe you should be considering a career in espionage.

PAT OWTRAM: I said: “Well, yes, I do crossword puzzles.” And I'm like: “I enjoy doing that.” And then a few more questions. And then they said right, they were taking me on as a member of the First Aid Nursing Home - which was one of the oldest of the women's associations, wartime ones going back to the Boer Wars - and that I would come back in a week's time, and I’d get uniform, and I would be in. 

NARRATOR: The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, FANY, as it’s abbreviated, was a unit that specialized in nursing and intelligence operations. Despite worrying she was too young to get her chance to join the war effort, Jean was in. She would be working for the Special Operations Executive in Baker Street in London. If the SOE sounds familiar that's because it's the same network of spies our last episode's true spy, Virginia Hall, belonged to. In Baker Street, Jean was receiving and deciphering the coded messages of Allied secret agents and resistance fighters.

JEAN OWTRAM: Secret agents working underground in Central Europe, southern Europe. And I did work for a while with the ones working in France, Belgium, and Northern Europe. 

NARRATOR: The messages contained vital intelligence for the Allied military and the British War Office. 

JEAN OWTRAM: Any troop movements, anything the German Army was doing, any agents that we had in Europe - and there were many of those who needed help getting information back in code - and then help decode it, and pass it through to the appropriate divisions, and so forth. 

NARRATOR: Jean would have known an enormous amount of classified intel. Just like her sister Pat, the codebreakers in Baker Street were sworn to secrecy. No one could know she was a spy. Although, sometimes, people did figure it out.

JEAN OWTRAM: I was stationed in London, going to Baker Street, which was the secret headquarters. I used to go on a bus every day, but getting off at different places so they wouldn't know I was going to this particular secret center. But one day, when I was coming back on the bus, I got on at one of the usual places but they varied every day. And I got on the bus and I heard the conductor saying: “Any more spies?” And, of course, everybody turned their heads around. 

NARRATOR: Despite being outed by the local bus driver, Jean loved the work she was doing at Baker Street and she was good at it. She quickly became known for having a particularly useful knack for deciphering corrupt messages - messages with mistakes.

JEAN OWTRAM: I think we'd done things as children with our parents, connected with jigsaw puzzles, with all sorts of things where you had to use your mind to try and sort out what could have gone wrong if we didn't get the right answers. So it was very familiar, this business of trying to correct the corruption. You would think: “What is the most likely thing? This person is working under pressure, at speed. They got confused with another word. Something has happened.”

NARRATOR: These were the messages spies would send when in the grips of the enemy and desperate to send words before they were taken hostage or worse.

JEAN OWTRAM: It's not an easy thing to remember at this distance because one was working at top speed and very often on a night shift - because that's when messages tended to come through urgently. The daytime ones would usually be just information on getting more supplies or something like that. But if the enemy was on the doorstep and they were desperate to let you know it, probably it's 2 am. I think one was just on alert the whole time.

NARRATOR: Despite the bombs that periodically rained on London, Jean was fairly safe in the bowels of the Baker Street office. But her codebreaking mission was about to take her closer to the danger. She was being posted abroad. With no idea where she was going or if she’d even make it, Jean boarded a troopship that sailed out of the safety of the harbor and into waters crawling with enemy submarines and U-boats. 

JEAN OWTRAM: We got on board a ship at Liverpool and sailed out into the Atlantic. And then it turned left and went down and then left again. And we're just going through the rocks of Gibraltar. And we were allowed, at that point, to come up on deck. Women weren't allowed on deck at night, but we were allowed to go up and see us coming into the Mediterranean. And we sailed through the Mediterranean on the American-African side. And we went to Cairo and then we had the opportunity of flying over to southern Italy, which I put my name down for, and I stayed in Bari in southern Italy for the rest of the war.

NARRATOR: Despite being just two hours from the frontline in Italy, Jean wasn’t fazed. 

JEAN OWTRAM: I was just too excited to be going into an action station instead of being somewhere in England - or even the luxury of Cairo where everybody was having a peacetime sort of life and seemed to have much more money than I had - so when I arrived in Italy, by now, I was into a war zone.

NARRATOR: And there were stark reminders of that everywhere. One time Jean was hitchhiking from Florence and, on a road, came across a lorry.

JEAN OWTRAM: The lorry stopped because another one had broken down. And I was talking to the people driving the lorry, and I said casually: “Oh, what have you got in the back of this lorry?” And they said: “Corpses.” And it was people who'd been killed all over Italy and they were taken back for burial in Rome. I think it was on the same trip that we stopped - or we passed a place on the side of the road - and there was a body lying there, and it was one of our own people. And I was brought back to realizing: “This was not a game we were playing.” 

NARRATOR: It certainly wasn’t. Bari, where Jean was posted, was on the southeastern side of Italy, perpendicular across the Adriatic Sea to Dubrovnik in Croatia which was then part of Yugoslavia. At that point, Bari was part of Allied-occupied territory and served as a base for Jean to work with the undercover agents posted in the Balkans - predominantly in Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia - gathering intel on Axis movements there.

JEAN OWTRAM: Although the Germans were retreating, they weren't retreating everywhere by any means. There are still a lot of people in great danger and we wanted to help them as fast as we could.

NARRATOR: And back home in Britain, the Allies were aware of the imminent need to act. June 1944. The D-Day preparations are underway. Pat Owtram is posted to Dover on the south coast, just 20 miles from occupied France over the English Channel. 

PAT OWTRAM: We were so near France, actually, you could see the sun glistening on the windscreens of the cars going up and down the cliffs opposite it. So it seemed very strange, rather tragic that we were so near France. We couldn't do anything toward liberating it until, thank goodness, we got to D-Day. Preparations, of course, in that part of England, all on the south coast for the landings. We didn't know exactly what it was going to be, but we were limited to a 20-mile range - couldn't go further, really much further than Canterbury. And couldn't go up to London anymore for some months before the D-Day landings actually happened. And we did see, going past under our cliff, convoy after convoy of Allied landing craft and other shipping. One ship - I only remember one - a ship was actually directly hit by a German shell right under a cliff because it caught fire. Nobody got off and it drifted off. The convoy went on with a gap, which was obviously what the order said. They had to do that. 

JEAN OWTRAM: It was a very tense and interesting time leading up to D-Day.

NARRATOR: June 6th, 1944. 0600 hours. 156,000 American, British, and Canadian soldiers prepare to launch onto the beaches of Normandy in a grand offensive to take Europe from the Axis powers. The plans are so secret that not even spies are told.

JEAN OWTRAM: The only news then was from normal radio bulletins. We didn't hear anything directly from the Navy. So, to begin with, we ran it if it was not going so well.

NARRATOR: In the days after, the Allies swept across Europe, sometimes taking towns and strongholds quickly while other times stopped and pushed back by barrages of heavy German fire. The forward momentum of the offensive relied on encrypted intelligence relayed from operatives in the field and codebreakers like Pat’s sister Jean in Italy making sense of it. But not all the messages the codebreakers received were war secrets. Even in a war zone, with the enemy at the door, there was still time for a little flirting.

JEAN OWTRAM: Well, we used to get the messages in from all our agents working underground. or I recognized [from] various countries in southern Europe. And we were able to send an occasional personal message through to them, which made the whole thing a little more relaxed because we knew that our agents working over there were under a lot of pressure having to cope with very dangerous situations. And although the information they were sending us was very important we felt their feeling of being appreciated - there was some security that we knew what they were doing and what was going on - was just quite important. So we used to send the odd message, which was really part of a joke or something like that, just to give them a feeling of safety, of being in touch with us. 

NARRATOR: By the end of summer 1944, the Allied frontline was moving further and further into what was previously German-occupied territory and the codebreakers were hearing rumblings of a big operation on the horizon. 

JEAN OWTRAM: We knew we’d got them on the move and that this was going to be a critical time for these southern European states. And everybody wanted to be down to work overtime and to see what was going on.

NARRATOR: September 1st, 1944: Operation Ratweek is launched. It is a series of intense coordinated attacks on Axis communication lines in the Balkans. 

JEAN OWTRAM: We were getting messages from our agents in the usual way of where they were, what was happening in that particular area. Rat Week, which was a rather unkind reference to the German's retreat, was one of the most exciting times and everybody wants to be involved in it.

NARRATOR: The corrupt ciphers landed on Jean’s desk. 

JEAN OWTRAM: I had to take the urgent messages - or ones which have to be done in a hurry - about an agent. He'd got it mixed up. I had to try and un-wrangle it so that I could read what he was asking for, what he needed. They were desperate to get material out before they themselves were killed or taken prisoner or something terrible would happen. And you were aware that their life was what you were trying to save. 

NARRATOR: That cipher on a piece of paper could be a life in your hands. But how do you know if you’ve wrongly decoded something, or if it came in wrong in the first place? And if it has, where do you even begin to unpick it? Quick. The clock is ticking. 

JEAN OWTRAM: What if we decoded a message wrong? Well, one hoped it was because the person who was coding it had been under pressure and got it wrong. And therefore, you had to try and think: “What could have happened? Why have they gone wrong on this one?” I was rather good at that because we did crosswords from early childhood with our mother at home. And so looking for a mistake was something that I was perfectly used to in a crossword puzzle. But you also had to take into account what they are likely to have done and they are likely to do, having given you a misquote on something. Or is it going to be that a number of letters slipped somehow and they've crossed into the wrong place for decoding? You had to have an inquisitive mind. And I found I did take responsibility for quite a lot of that. 

NARRATOR: The lives of Britain’s undercover agents were in her hands. Which is pretty astonishing when you remember she was only 18 years old. So did she ever make a mistake? 

JEAN OWTRAM: Not consciously. I have sometimes, I think, been defeated. I thought I was getting the answer to the problem and it didn't work. But, usually, you could go back and see where you'd gone wrong.

NARRATOR: It was high pressure and high stakes, but Jean always kept a cool head. 

JEAN OWTRAM: I could understand the urgency of it, but not the fear of getting it wrong. You have a certain amount of confidence in yourself, I think, at that age, which may have been why - rather than any particular skills - that I could carry the responsibility for this.

NARRATOR: After two intense weeks for all involved, Operation Ratweek ended. The mission had been a success and the Axis powers were driven further into submission in the Balkans and across the continent. Things were winding down in Europe and in the spring of 1945, the war in Europe was declared over. As you can imagine, celebrations erupted across the continent. Jean was in Italy. 

JEAN OWTRAM: I was with a friend driving in southern Italy and we stopped on the top of a hill, looked down at the view and we suddenly heard cheering and a band playing at a town several miles away. Big uproar. And we said: “That's it.” And we drove down a mountainside and joined in because the war had actually ended in Europe. 

NARRATOR: Pat was in London and remembers the scenes outside Buckingham Palace. 

PAT OWTRAM: On the day we all felt we must go to the palace, which we did in great crowds. And they all came out on the balcony and everybody cheered. It was a tremendously celebratory day. And as far as I remember, it went on late at night and nobody bothered about what time you got back to your quarters or anything. We just, everybody, all of us celebrated. 

NARRATOR: Before returning home to England, Jean would have one last message to decode.

JEAN OWTRAM: Having won the war in Europe, so to speak, I had been on duty and I was on the night shift that night. And so I had gone to bed and everything had been wonderful. And I was woken up in the early hours of the morning because there was another message coming through and it had a line - ‘Very Important’ - on it. And so I didn't wake anyone else up. And I went along to decode this message. And it was telling all the troops in the northern corner of Italy to be on standby for a cricket match that day, and no leave was to be given to anybody. And I thought: “This is absolutely insane. Someone’s been drinking too much, but I better decode it and pass it on to the general in charge with my apologies.” But this is what the message said. And I passed it through. And it was only years later that I discovered what had happened.

NARRATOR: In reality, there was no cricket match. It was a secret order instructing the Allied troops in Northern Italy to stand on alert in anticipation of a land grab by General Josip Broz Tito - the leader of Yugoslavia - for the area of Trieste where Italy and Croatia meet. When Tito made his move to take the territory, the British troops were ready to swiftly shut it down before another conflict arose. Even with a hangover, Jean was still on her game. The war had ended, but even with all the fear and excitement they’d experienced over the years, neither woman ever mentioned the covert work they were doing. 

PAT OWTRAM: We were always extremely close. We always wrote a lot of letters. Our mother was great at writing, too. So I knew what Jean was up to and a good deal about the social side of the life she was having. But, of course, absolutely nothing about the serious side of it. 

NARRATOR: And when they were finally reunited in London, it was not discussed. Although, their father noticed that his daughters did have a new air of sophistication about them.

PAT OWTRAM: We saw quite a bit of each other, didn't we, at the end of the war? I think we were both in London. Jean and I went out to have dinner at the Mayfair Hotel. And I remember he said: “We can have a drink before dinner. What would you girls like?” And Jean and I both said: “Whiskey.” And he looked quite appalled. And he said: “Girls don't drink whiskey. Have a sherry.” And he just hadn't realized it, since he went away, that we had grown up quite a bit.

NARRATOR: In November 1945, Pat retired from the spy game and traveled to Norway to work as an archivist at the British Embassy in Oslo. Meanwhile, Jean took up a new role within the FANY - she utilized those useful German language skills in a new line of work: homing refugees in London, many of whom were survivors liberated from the concentration camps across Europe. But she was hankering to go abroad again, to feel the same excitement she had codebreaking in Italy. Then, in a stroke of good fortune, she was appointed as personal secretary to Major General Sir Fitzroy Maclean - Churchill's special envoy to the Yugoslav leader Josip Tito. He was the big boss, the head of the operation in the Balkans that Jean had been working on during the war. Back in the world of covert military operations, Jean’s first mission took her back to Italy briefly and then on to Austria, where she would, for the first time, witness the true horror of the Nazi regime. In September 1947, Sir Maclean and Jean arrived at Mauthausen, one of the largest and most notorious Nazi concentration camps. 

JEAN OWTRAM: I had actually been into one of the big camps and had felt this instinct that something very evil had happened in this camp. I went to the trial of some people who had been in concentration camps and gave evidence against people who had run the camps. And of course, terrible stories were coming through. 

NARRATOR: In a letter to her parents about the trial Jean wrote: "They’re trying 12 men who were connected with the biggest Austrian concentration camp, Mauthausen - it had a 90 percent death rate. The 12 prisoners are pure Hollywood but far worse. They all look completely devoid of any reasonableness. The two worst are the doctor and the commandant, Winkler. Winkler was a gardener in an asylum before he was given Mauthausen. The doctor did all the things one reads about in the Sunday dispatch, but it’s frightfully hard to believe one’s looking at a real person while the witnesses talk about him. It’s as if anything so evil automatically becomes inhuman." 

JEAN OWTRAM: One of them came onto the platform in front of where I was sitting in the audience watching, and I had this feeling of evil, which I had had on the field in the war camps as well. And it was very strong and I didn't want to be there. I wanted to get away from this and pretend it never happened, and you can't do that. Well, once it happens, it’s there for the rest of time.

NARRATOR: Of all the missions Jean undertook during the war, bearing witness to the Mauthausen trials affected her the most. 

JEAN OWTRAM: I was doing things to try and take my part, and to fight the enemy, and all that sort of thing that was enthusiastic. I was doing a job. And we won. But getting back afterward and working with the refugee camps and the people who survived that suffered... Suddenly I was seeing it from the other side, and that came home completely different and took me by surprise. I was so shocked when I saw what it's been like for people who were not dressed up in nice uniforms like me and had a good time. This is what war was really about. And it was quite different. 

NARRATOR: As the years wore on, the war loomed less large in people’s lives. They didn’t want to think about it anymore. In 1962, Pat took a job as a TV producer for the BBC and Jean became a social worker. Still, they never spoke about their spy work. 

JEAN OWTRAM: I don't remember talking about it all that much to Pat about what she did in the war and vice versa, I think we were busy building our new lives, and I went abroad as much as I could and got jobs overseas. And so we just didn't meet that often. 

NARRATOR: Also gagged by the Official Secrets Act, the sisters took pride in honoring the oath of life-long confidentiality. 

PAT OWTRAM: I think I would still take it extremely seriously today if I had to sign the Official Secrets Act for any reason. And I have since come across people working for secret services quite a bit, and I would never dream of asking them things that I didn't think they wanted to let me know. But I think secrecy is a very important thing to keep in certain lines of work.

NARRATOR: But then, in the late 1960s, over two decades after the war ended, when the sisters began noticing that never-before-seen testimonies from Bletchley Park codebreakers were being published, they decided to break their silence 

JEAN OWTRAM: It suddenly was years after the war before I felt I could even ask Jean what she’d been doing. I do remember being very interested to hear what Jean had done in the war because I wasn't exactly sure. And I was duly impressed by the job she had. And it's… we perhaps grew in each other's estimation, when we knew what we had been doing. 

NARRATOR: Over seven decades later, it’s no wonder that these codebreaking sisters still take such pride in themselves and each other. 

JEAN OWTRAM: Although you never got any feedback. We certainly couldn't have won the war without a rather effective intelligence service. I think ours may even have been rather better than the Germans. I did try to find out after the war. Had they had the kind of listening stations that we had on the coast: And it doesn't appear that they did. And, we only played a certain part, which I think was a vital part. And I do appreciate the importance of the intelligence Jean was involved with and I was involved with.

NARRATOR: I’m Vanessa Kirby. Join us next week for another secret operation with True Spies. We all have valuable spy skills, and our experts are here to help you discover yours. Get an authentic assessment of your spy skills, created by a former Head of Training at British Intelligence, now at SPYSCAPE.com.