WWII Espionage

[PADDY]

See the thread on Crete...

My uncle worked for SOE on Crete during WWII and was decorated by King George VI (God Bless Im) for his efforts.

 

[MelissaAnne]

These are GREAT suggestions. Thanks, everyone. I'm off to Amazon.com...

 

[nightandthecity]

Many German resisters ened up acting as allied agents. the most important being no less a person than Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr (German Military Intelligence), but their contact tended to be with Britain or Russia rather than the US.

As far as I know the full story of the German resistance has never been written. When it is we will probably know more a lot more about allied spies in Germany. You can find material on military dissidents like the July 44 plotters and on the more 'respectable' groups like White Rose, but the armed working class resistance (often based on the underground leftist parties) has had litle coverage, and the same is true of the German refugees who fought in the allied military, though in numerical terms these seem to have been the two biggest groups. The British army even had special all-German commando units, which strikes me as a subject crying out for a specialist study before the last remaining members pass on.

Incidentally....Sir Ken Adam, who did the sets and invented Qs various gadgets for the early Bond films, was a WW2 German fighter pilot....in the RAF!!

 

[Story]

Entire article posted, as it might go stale

http://www.business-standard.com/common/storypage.php?leftnm=lmnu4&subLeft=6&autono=97031&tab=r

The truth about India`s spy princess
Business Standard
July 3, 2006
Nilanjana S Roy

Once you’ve seen it, you cannot forget the crematorium at Dachau, the concentration camp where thousands of people were slaughtered by the Nazis during World War Two. I saw it five decades after the war had ended. Time had done nothing to obliterate the horror of a place where everything from the cramped quarters to the furnaces had been designed to inflict suffering and death on people with an inhuman efficiency.

At that time, the legend of Noor Inayat Khan had been forgotten; the Indians who visited Dachau usually missed the plaque to her memory: “A la memoire de Noor Inayat Khan, 1914-1944; Madeleine dans La Resistance, Fusillee a Dachau; Operatrice Radio du Reseau Buckmaster,Croix de Guerre 1939-1945, George Cross.” After Shrabani Basu’s well-researched Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan (Lotus/ Roli Books), I suspect most Indian visitors to Dachau will pause to honour the shy, dreamy girl whose extraordinary life ended in this terrible place.

Over the years her story has been told by authors who lacked the facts, or who saw in Noor a wonderfully exotic figure, an Indian princess turned Mata Hari. Laurent Joffin wrote a trashy romance, The Forgotten Princess, in which Noor appeared as a smouldering, sensuous and not terribly bright spy.

One of the few books that set down the truth about Noor was written by a friend and associate, Jean Overton Fuller, though even Fuller was hampered by a lack of information. Last year, Shauna Singh Baldwin fictionalised Noor Inayat Khan’s life in The Tiger Claw. Her account was not inaccurate, but anyone who reads Baldwin’s book and then turns to Basu’s non-fiction account will realise that Noor’s life didn’t need fictional embellishment. The most satisfying parts of Baldwin’s novel were the ones that drew on real life-Noor’s training as a wireless operator, the dangers of trying to evade discovery by the Germans, her capture just a few weeks before she was due to return to Britain, the cruel end in Dachau.

Basu’s book is far more interesting than The Tiger Claw. In order to tell the whole story of Noor Inayat Khan’s life, Basu waited until 2003, when the archive that held the personal files of SOE agents was finally opened. She went to the Sufi Headquarters in The Hague and to Dachau, visited Inayat Khan’s tomb in Delhi and spoke to members of the Special Forces Club. Her research is extensive, and makes up for the slightly bland style.

Noor Inayat Khan was born on New Year’s Day in Moscow in 1914, to the musician and Sufi preacher Hazrat Inayat Khan and his American wife, Ora Ray Baker. Hazrat Inayat Khan was descended from Tipu Sultan’s family and had performed at concerts of Indian music in America, Paris and Moscow. Noor grew up in London and in the small village of Tremblaye, outside Paris. She was a creative child who loved listening to her father’s lectures on Sufism, wrote sentimental poems and played the harp and the piano. As a young adult, she studied child psychology, translated the Jataka Tales into English and contributed stories to the children’s page of the Sunday Figaro. She was quite beautiful; petite, doe-eyed, with small, near-perfect features: little about her suggested a future spy.

In 1940, she and her brother Vilayat decided to go to England and join the war effort. Noor joined the SOE as a wireless operator: it was a humble job, but a dangerous one, and some of her trainers feared that she was not bright enough, or that she would crack under pressure. Selwyn Jepson, who recruited her, didn’t share their fears—he felt instinctively that she was right for the job.

Noor was sent into France in June 1943, working as a radio operator under the code name “Madeleine”. Prosper, the group she joined, had been under surveillance by the Germans for a while, though, and her colleagues were arrested within a few days of her arrival in Paris: most of them were executed or died in concentration camps. Noor became the last radio operator in France; for several months, she managed to make her transmissions while dodging the Germans. In October, her luck ran out: she was captured and imprisoned. During the next few months, she was interrogated several times; she was shackled and had either potato peel or cabbage soup to eat, but she didn’t crack. She was transferred to Dachau in September 1944. On the night of 12th September, Noor was brutally beaten and tortured before she and three other women were shot and sent to the crematorium. Seven months later, Dachau was liberated.

 

[Alan Eardley]

Book on SOE

In my opinion the best treatises on the history of SOE in WW2 are:

'SOE The Special Operations Executive 1940 - 46' by MRD Foot
and 'SOE in France' by the same author .

Foot 'was there' as an army officer from 1939-45, was awarded the Croix de Guerre as an SAS officer in Britanny in 1944, and later taught history at Oxford and Manchester universities. He knows his stuff and can write in a good academic style.

The second book is difficult to obtain, but the first is still available in the 1984 paperback edition from Arrow Books in the UK (ISBN 0-7493-0378-6) see www.randomhouse.co.uk.

 

[nightandthecity]

Yes, Foot's books are excellent...

This website has a lot of info on the women of SOE. I found it when doing a Google search on Nancy Wake after re-reading her memoirs.......

http://www.64-baker-street.org/main/index.html

 

[MelissaAnne]

I managed to snag a book on Admiral Canaris at Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago. Looks to be a very interesting read. I also want to get my hands on the "How to be a Spy" SOE handbook, but I need to wait until I have a bit more extra cash on hand.

Thanks for the great links and book suggestions, everyone. VERY MUCH appreciated! :eusa_clap

 

[Harp]

Admiral Canaris penned his own memoir thirty-some years ago,
but I cannot recall its title.

 

[Story]

The Violet Szabo Museum
http://womenshistory.about.com/gi/d...p://www.violette-szabo-museum.co.uk/foyer.htm

 

[Mycroft]

Most Stuff by H. Keith Milton is great. The Ultimate Spy Book and the Eyewittness Book on Spies (Titled: Spy) are great. Also, check History Channel Shows, like Sworn to Secrecy.

 

[Clyde R.]

Another "oldie but goodie" is 'Secret Agents, Spies, and Saboteurs- Famous Undercover Missions of World War II' by Janusz Piekalkiewicz. I read it years ago as a library book but recently got my own copy from amazon, I think. The book has twenty seven chapters as diverse as the special operations against the German battleship Tirpitz to the Warsaw Uprising to the war against the nazi Arctic weather stations. Originally in German the english translation is excellent and I think the book is still worthwhile as a good overview of the irregular war in Europe.

Here's a link to it on amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/06...644041/ref=sr_1_2/002-2190816-6141645?ie=UTF8

 

[Miss Marnie]

a life in secrets by Sarah Helm

I have just finished "a life in secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII" by Sarah Helm. Helm's bio of Vera Atkins deals with her efforts in trying to locate and discover what happened to missing SOE agents. A good deal of the focus is on Atkin's efforts to find the truth to what became of the 16 missing female agents including Noor Inayat Khan (aka Nora Baker); Violette Szalbo, Madeleine Damerment, etc.

 

[carebear]

I'm looking for another individual but I found this American spy in Berlin book about Fritz Kolbe.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0871138794?v=glance

This is the guy I was looking for...

Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen

Peter Capstick was writing a biography of him at the time of his death (so the final product isn't as good as it might have been) but his career with British intelligence covers both wars and 3 continents, including work with the OSS. Quite a character and one of many "amateurs" Britain commonly and continuously used for espionage. Their amateur interests (Meinertzhagen's was ornithology) and non-military status provided natural covers.

He actually met with Hitler 3 times, the last with a loaded revolver in his pocket!

http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/news/0305mein.html

 

[missjo]

www.nederland4045.nl/soe

I didnt give you that link...

 

[Story]

Review of:
A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII
By Sarah Helm
493 pages
NAN A. TALESE/DOUBLEDAY


British spy boss comes in from the cold
Oh what a tangled web Vera Atkins wove, when first she practiced to deceive; but the wartime espionage supervisor always handled her position with aplomb

By William Grimes
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE , NEW YORK
Sunday, Sep 03, 2006,Page 18

In 1941, with its back against the wall, Britain was ready to try just about anything to avoid defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany. And so it happened that, to her surprise, a 33-year-old woman named c was recruited by a top-secret agency, the Special Operations Executive, where she ended up overseeing a network of British spies operating in France. Like many of the people around her, Vera Atkins was an amateur. Unlike them, she hid a past so mysterious that it took decades to unravel. Her extraordinary life, pieced together in a stupendous job of reporting by the British journalist Sarah Helm, is the subject of A Life in Secrets.

Helm, a longtime reporter for The Sunday Times of London and The Independent, met her subject only once, in 1998, but that was enough. Nearing 90, Atkins, who died in 2000, remained an intimidating figure, a heavy smoker with a chilly, even haughty demeanor, a precise upper-class accent and a remarkable ability to summon up certain historical details and evade others.

This was recognizably the striking, self-possessed woman described by the Nazi spy catcher Hugo Bleicher, who was interrogated by Atkins just after the war. “She turned out to have more aplomb than all the other officers put together,” he wrote in his memoirs. “She boxed me in with astonishing ease and consummate tactics.” As one of her colleagues put it, “she had a very manly brain.”

Atkins, by the time she caught up with Bleicher, was a woman on a mission. Of the 400 agents sent to France by F Section, the French division of the Special Operations Executive, more than a hundred were still missing three months after D-Day, and Atkins, who had personally seen many of them off from airfields in Britain, was determined to learn their fate. For the next several years, she would crisscross France and Germany to get answers. Of special concern to her were the 12 women she had sent over as couriers and wireless operators, above all the gentle, almost childlike Noor Inayat Khan, a 29-year-old of Indian descent who volunteered for hazardous duty but declared herself incapable of lying.

Helm describes the workings of F Section in fascinating detail, including the fact that in 1943 it was betrayed by a French pilot, who flew agents from Britain to France. As a result, many of its operatives walked directly into the waiting arms of the Nazis, who took their radios and began requesting more agents, money and arms, which F Section duly sent.

The history of F Section, and the Special Operations Executive, blends heroism and ineptitude, with top honors for incompetence going to Atkins' superior, Maurice Buckmaster. A genial bumbler, Buckmaster refused to believe that his operations had gone awry until the Germans, on orders from Hitler, sent taunting messages thanking F Section for the cash and the guns.

Atkins was a cipher to her colleagues and remained one for most of her life. To uncover the truth, Helm traveled thousands of kilometers, from Romania to Canada, to pore over documents and photographs in family records, photo albums and state archives. Detail by detail, she squeezed the story out of surviving relatives and wartime colleagues.

Some readers will find this tedious and overly scrupulous. Helm turns over every last stone. For long stretches, her reporting becomes the story. And F Section was, after all, a small cog in the British war machine. Yet her obsessions and those of her subject mesh in a compelling way. The long trek across war-ravaged Germany and France in search of Atkins and her spies yields enough material to generate a dozen Len Deighton novels.

Atkins, despite her posh English accent and her adoration of all things upper class and British, was a Romanian Jew with the family name Rosenberg. The family, with roots in Germany, South Africa and Britain, ran a successful timber business. Vera grew up speaking multiple languages and attended finishing school in Switzerland.

Helms discovered that Atkins probably began supplying information to British intelligence while working as a secretary for an oil company in Bucharest. After making her way to Britain in 1937, she was recruited for F Section, an ideal candidate, considering her fluent French and German.

In other ways, she was less than ideal. As a Jew, she encountered prejudice from the sort of upper-class Englishmen she so admired. More seriously, and unknown to anyone until Helm unearthed the facts, she had secretly traveled to Antwerp in 1940 to pay US$150,000 to a Nazi intelligence agent to secure a passport for a family member, who agreed in return to supply intelligence to the Nazis.

The search for the missing agents provides Helm with her most gripping pages, as Atkins, racing against time, tracks down and interrogates Nazi officers, prison-camp workers and former prisoners. Some of the missing returned. Brian Stonehouse, a Jewish agent, miraculously survived four concentration camps. Odette Sansom, a courier, survived Ravensbrueck by pretending to be the wife of her spy partner, who happened to be named Churchill. This ruse earned her special consideration, although her Churchill was no relation to the prime minister.

Most of the female agents were sent on doomed missions that led them, eventually, to concentration camps and execution. Noor Khan, considered emotionally frail, turned out to be fierce and courageous when captured. She refused to cooperate with the Germans, showed them nothing but contempt, and in the instant before her death, after she had been tortured and beaten to a bloody pulp, spoke but a single French word, liberte.

Atkins may have been too secretive for her own good. In later years she was suspected of being either a German or a Soviet spy. One former colleague, writing to her in the 1960s, faulted her for being discreet, “so discreet indeed as to seem mysterious, if you are not mysterious.”

She was mysterious, with a lot to be mysterious about. Helm, to her great credit, digs to the very bottom of it and lays it out for the world to see.

 

[Story]

How apropro for F.L.

Britain cracked WW2 secret "dress code"
Mon Sep 4, 2006 12:26 AM BST

By Peter Griffiths

LONDON (Reuters) - German spies hid secret messages in drawings of models wearing the latest fashions in an attempt to outwit Allied censors during World War Two, according to British security service files released on Monday.

Nazi agents relayed sensitive military information using the dots and dashes of Morse code incorporated in the drawings.

They posted the letters to their handlers, hoping that counter-espionage experts would be fooled by the seemingly innocent pictures.

But British secret service officials were aware of the ruse and issued censors with a code-breaking guide to intercept them.

The book -- part of a batch of British secret service files made public for the first time -- included an example of a code hidden in a drawing of three young models.

"Heavy reinforcements for the enemy expected hourly," reads a message disguised as a decorative pattern in the stitching of their gowns, hats and blouses.

The files reveal other ingenious ways spies tried to send coded notes through the post.

Invisible ink, pinpricks and indentations on letters were all used to convey details of troop movements, bombing raids and ship-building.

They hid codes in sheet music, descriptions of chess moves and shorthand symbols disguised as normal handwriting. Postcards were spliced in half, stuffed with wafer-thin notes and resealed.

Agents also used secret alphabets and messages which could only be read by taking the first letter of certain words.

The capture of two German agents in 1942 uncovered two such codes which British intelligence had repeatedly failed to crack, the declassified files reveal.

Britain's wartime spy chief David Petrie described the failure as "somewhat disturbing".

The code was used in a letter from "Hubert" to "Aunt Janet" to conceal the message: "14 Boeing Fortresses arrived yesterday in Hendon (London). Pilots expect to raid Kiel (Germany)."

As the war went on, counter-espionage officials developed ways of spotting suspicious letters.

Telltale signs of a spy's handiwork included rambling letters with no apparent point, often sent to neutral countries with too many stamps.

Clumsy or awkward phrases could be a sign that words were being forced to fit a code template.

Lists of numbers and long messages about games of bridge also aroused suspicion.

 

[The Mad Hatter]

The Cretan Runner: The Story of the German Occupation (Paperback)
by George Psychoundakis is the story of a Cretan resistance "runner" who carried messages to Allied spies based in Crete during WWII.

 

[MelissaAnne]

This is what I get for not checking in the Lounge for awhile - a ton of invaluable links. Thanks, all, for the great resources.

 

[Story]

http://www.psywar.org/malingering.php

Extract from Black Propaganda - Clandestine Psychological Warfare of World War II
by Lee Richards

 

[Story]

British, French Honor U.S. Spy Virginia Hall

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6615482

All Things Considered, December 12, 2006 ¬? Virginia Hall, a great American spy, is being honored today in Washington, D.C., by the French and British governments. The Gestapo once declared Hall "the most dangerous of all Allied spies" who had to be destroyed.

And they offered a reward in Wanted Posters for her demise. She was also known as the woman with a limp -- a hunting accident early in life left her an amputee.

But Hall went on to become a coordinator of the Resistance movement in France; she died in 1982. Hall's niece, Lorna Catling, accepted posthumous honors presented by the British ambassador at the home of the French ambassador. Noah Adams talks to Catling.