Clare Mulley's "Agent Zo"

Clare Mulley is an award-winning public historian, author and broadcaster, primarily focused on female experience during the Second World War.

Her new book is Agent Zo: The Untold Story of a Fearless World War II Resistance Fighter, the critically-acclaimed biography of Elżbieta Zawacka, the only woman to parachute from Britain to Nazi German-occupied Poland. Previous titles include the award-winning The Woman Who Saved the Children, on Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children although not fond of individual youngsters; The Spy Who Loved, a biography of the first woman to serve Britain as a special agent in the Second World War and who was acclaimed as Churchill’s ‘favourite spy’, Krystyna Skarbek aka Christine Granville; and The Women Who Flew for Hitler, which tells the story of Nazi Germany’s only two female test pilots, one of whom tried to save Hitler’s life while the other tried to kill him. Mulley’s books are widely translated, and have all been optioned for film or TV.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to Agent Zo and reported the following:

From page 99:

Zo was in full self-preservation mode. Striding into an upstairs dining-room, when she saw no exit she took a napkin from a table, draped it over her arm, and headed back to the staircase. Before she could climb any further, someone pulled her roughly to one side. Gesturing her to be silent, Paco steered Zo into a backroom. It struck her that she had no idea whether he was playing both sides, or if the guards had simply come to the inn for a glass of beer and been lucky. Before she had gathered her thoughts, Paco shoved her out of a side door directly down onto the mountainside…

'Agent Zo', in fact Elżbieta Zawacka, was very much the courageous woman of action during the Second World War, so it seems fitting to stumble across her evading Nazi German arrest, on page 99 of the book, through a mixture of cool presence of mind and being thrown from an upstairs door! This was in the spring of 1943, when she had already served behind enemy lines for over three years, as an intelligence officer and courier for the Polish resistance ‘Home Army’. Having already had a particularly close escape, forcing her to leap from a fast-moving steam-train, Zo had now been appointed as the only female emissary of the commander of an Allied army, and sent with microfilm across almost 1,000 miles of occupied Europe, to Britain.

Despite this close shave, as well as almost drowning in the water tender of another train, and being shot at in the freezing mountain passes of the Pyrenees, Zo completed her mission. That September she became the only woman to parachute from Britain to enemy-occupied Poland, where she took part in the largest organised act of defiance against Nazi German-occupation: the Warsaw Uprising. The great irony of her dramatic true story is that she was a hair’s breadth from capture from the very first day of the war to the last, but she was only ever arrested by the Soviet-imposed communist regime in her own country, Poland, after the war. To say more would be to give too much away…!

Visit Clare Mulley's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Women Who Flew For Hitler.

The Page 99 Test: The Women Who Flew For Hitler.

My Book, The Movie: Agent Zo.

--Marshal Zeringue