Allies Undercover: The Clandestine Services

Countless movies and books tell heart pounding stories of intelligence agents and spies who fought World War Two not on the front lines, but in hidden and dangerous ways to undermine Germany’s ability to prosecute the war. Working in support of resistance cells across Europe, impossibly brave citizens left the relative safety of England, the United States, even Switzerland to undertake dangerous missions in occupied Europe. Their stories are compelling and often romanticized; ordinary people willing to sacrifice everything for a cause are a rare breed. Well-known stories memorialize the successes—the morale-building missions that helped spies and resisters persist in their work, But there were also terrible losses—of agents and among the broader citizenry—when a mission was compromised and sometimes, because it was successful.

The Allies ran many clandestine agencies during the war that sometimes worked in concert—but not always. First among them, the British Special Operations Executive, known variously as the Baker Street Irregulars, the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, and Churchill’s Secret Army. As you’ll see in War Bonds, shadowy SOE figures both assist and complicate the lives of Gordon, Beryl, and Jack.

The SOE grew out of three secret departments, or sections, within British intelligence. In 1938, the British Foreign Office created a propaganda organization known as Department EH—for Electra House, where it was headquartered. The British Military Intelligence, Section Six (MI6), had formed Section D—the D stood for destruction—to formulate ways to use sabotage and propaganda to weaken the enemy. All this, as the War Office expanded its Military Intelligence Research department (MIR) to examine how to use guerrilla warfare. Given the mission overlap and at Churchill’s behest, these sections merged in July 1940, becoming the Special Operations Executive.

An estimated 13,000 people worked in SOE initiatives, planning guerrilla sabotage and helping get eyes beyond the front lines to see what was really happening. Not all had roles that required them to risk their lives. In innocuous office buildings across the UK, SOE staff quietly forged identity papers and ration cards for use in the occupied countries. They sewed camouflage clothing, created fabric maps, embedded radios into suitcases, and concealed knives in the heels of shoes. Many appeared to be ordinary office workers, reporting to jobs at government departments with benign names like the Joint Technical Board or the Inter-Service Research Bureau.

American singer and entertainer Josephine Baker

SOE agents came from all classes and backgrounds, their common qualification a deep knowledge of the country they would infiltrate. Singer-dancer Josephine Baker had wide latitude to travel through Europe as she performed in clubs and theaters. As she did so, rubbing shoulders with Axis leaders who took in her shows, she collected intel on German troop movements and other telltale metrics. She passed her observations to the SOE on her sheet music—her notes in invisible ink.

Some operatives had criminal backgrounds—overlooked when a recruit was a gifted forger, lock-picker, or burglar. Dual nationality was especially useful, with diplomats, aristocrats, and socialites well-positioned to appear sympathetic to the Nazi cause and therefore gain access to important people and important information in the relaxed atmosphere of embassy parties and other gatherings. Whatever their position or assignment, SOE operatives were always on the lookout for like-minded people willing to join their effort.

Then there were the field agents who, after completing a grueling training regime, parachuted into occupied Europe and the Far East to conduct direct coordination of resistance movements. The drops were arranged by radio, radio operators known inside SOE as “the pianists.” These pianists had the most dangerous job, sending coded messages as rapidly as possible, as the enemy worked to jam their signal and zero in on their transmission point to capture and in many cases, execute them. These radio operators intentionally misspelled specific words when they transmitted: if a message came through without the pre-planned error, the folks back home knew the mission had been compromised.

Reinhard Heydrich, SS officer and mastermind of the Holocaust.

The SOE’s boldest and perhaps most visible mission came in May 1942 in Prague with Operation Anthropoid. This was the assassination of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, a principal designer of the Holocaust and the wellspring of many of the Nazis’ deadliest initiatives. He served as a leader of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia—a region Germany annexed populated by ethnic Czechs—where he instituted martial law, arrested and executed resisters and killed more than 75,000 Jews. Czech resistance fighters Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš laid in wait and attacked Heydrich’s car as he commuted home, Heydrich succumbing to his wounds days later. In retaliation, the Germans burned the villages of Ležáky and Lidice, alleging the assassins had connections to those communities. In all, more than 5000 people were killed, with many others deported to concentration camps.

More than 3000 women worked for the SOE, the books A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell and Code Name: Lise by Larry Loftis detailing the harrowing risks taken by two of them. They were known as Atkins’ Girls, working under the direction of SOE intelligence officer Vera Atkins. Born in Romania, Atkins was recruited before the war by Canadian intelligence to travel across Europe to assess the rising German threat. The movie “A Call to Spy” is a mostly accurate portrayal of her work overseeing 39 female agents in France, 13 of whom never returned.

This lecture by author Clare Mulley offers great insight into how the agents operated. Here, she shares the fascinating exploits of Krystyna Skarbek (aka Christine Granville) believed to be the first and longest serving female agent in the British secret services. Polish-born, she made her way to England after Germany invaded her country, practically forcing British intelligence to hire her so she could help free her homeland.

SOE activities spanned the world: France, Poland, The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Greece, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Denmark, Romania, Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and other parts of Africa, and Southeast Asia. In addition to blowing up railway lines and ammunition depots to disrupt supply chains, the SOE spread propaganda and fomented unrest in the occupied countries. The greater the number of Axis soldiers and resources diverted to keeping people in line meant fewer available to fight on the front lines.

(L) Julia Child, expert in the art of both French cooking and espionage
(R) Former MLB catcher and OSS operative Moe Berg

Even before the United States joined the war, the SOE was training future American spies at a camp in Oshawa, Canada. By 1942, the U.S, had created its own clandestine operation, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) helmed by William Donovan. OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the U.S. Armed Forces. At its height, OSS employed almost 24,000 people, among them, American chef Julia Child who developed recipes for military rations as she gathered information about the food supply in France. Moe Berg, a former Major League catcher and child of Ukrainian immigrants was another. Berg spoke several languages and armed with degrees from Princeton and Columbia Law School, worked with OSS in Europe after his baseball career to counter the German effort to build an atomic bomb.

Like their British counterparts, OSS Research & Development operatives printed fake German and Japanese-issued identification cards, and various passes, ration cards, and counterfeit money, then schemed to get them in the hands of those who needed them in the occupied countries. OSS ran missions in China (including Manchuria), Korea and Australia, the Atlantic islands and Finland, while the SOE operated in India, the Middle East and East Africa, and the Balkans. Both worked in Europe, the SOE acting as lead partner.

The SOE and OSS shared a headquarters in Algiers, but did not easily share information—sometimes working against one another as their leaders vied to promote their own government’s priorities. Operation Jedburgh in June of 1944 was the exception. Together, the two organizations dropped three-man parties of uniformed military personnel into France—100 men with 6,000 tons of equipment—to arm the French Resistance in support of the Normandy landings. Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower credited Jedburgh with impeding the movement of the Germans at key points, blunting the effectiveness of the 2nd Panzer Division, which enabled Allied troops to move inland more quickly.

While much was accomplished under OSS and SOE umbrellas, MI5, MI6 and the newly-constituted MI9 ran their own elaborate endeavors. MI5 staged “Operation Mincemeat” to fool the Germans about the Allied landing in Sicily. Novelist Ian Fleming, who went on to create perhaps the world’s best know secret agent in James Bond, was an aide on the team that planted a corpse carrying false intelligence about a planned Allied landing in the Balkans for the Germans to find. In the film about the mission, the Fleming character taps away at his typewriter, tossing out witty one-liners and outlandish ideas to fake out the Germans—a foreshadowing of the labyrinthine plots lines he would later write in his James Bond novels and screenplays.

On other fronts, Novelist Graham Greene was recruited to MI6, where he helped place a spy in the Vichy government. MI9, meanwhile, focused entirely on helping Allied soldiers and airmen taken prisoners of war. Ben McIntyre’s wonderful book Prisoners of the Castle describes how escape tools were smuggled to POWs inside the high-security fortress called Colditz—the prison reserved for high-value Allied captives. Compasses hidden in buttons and razor blades, screwdrivers concealed in cricket bats, hairbrushes that hid money—these and more came from the mind of MI9’s leader Christopher Hutton—“Clutty”—who discovered he could confound the Germans and hide valuable escape tools simply by using screws that turned in the wrong direction. The character of “Q” in the Bond films is believed to be based on the imaginatively brilliant and extremely quirky Clutty.

General Eisenhower estimated the French Resistance, supported by SOE and OSS, had been worth six divisions (a single division=6,000 to 25,000 soldiers). So it’s clear the agents in the shadows did much to amplify the work of the soldiers on the lines. After the war, the Office of Strategic Services morphed into CIA. The SOE was dissolved in January 1946, its intelligence work reverting to MI6. A memorial honoring those who served hangs on the west cloister of Westminster Abbey, dedicated by Queen Elizabeth in 1996—fifty years after the war.

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