On October 20, 1944, Noor Inayat Khan was executed by the Gestapo at Dachau concentration camp. She was thirty years old. According to testimony from a German SS officer, her last word was "Liberté."

Khan was born in Moscow in 1914 to an Indian Sufi mystic and an American woman of European descent. She grew up in Paris and London, trained as a nurse and studied music at the Paris Conservatoire, and published children's stories. When France fell in 1940, she and her family escaped to Britain. She joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and trained as a wireless operator.

The Special Operations Executive recruited her as a secret agent in 1943. She was the first female wireless operator dropped into occupied France. Her SOE handler later described her as unsuitable: too emotional, easily confused, impractical. She was dropped into France in June 1943 anyway, because the Gestapo had been arresting SOE agents rapidly and Paris's Prosper network desperately needed an operator.

She operated alone in Paris for four months, the last SOE wireless operator active in the city, transmitting from different locations to avoid detection. The Germans were hunting her. In October 1943, she was betrayed — by whom has been disputed ever since — and arrested by the Gestapo. They found her notebook, which contained the texts of all her transmitted messages in violation of security protocols. She attempted to escape from prison twice. She was transferred to a German prison, then to Dachau.

She received the George Cross and the Croix de Guerre posthumously.