The Fake Gestapo Cell in London in WW2

by Deborah Swift

During WW2 the government did its best to suppress the British Union of Fascists (BUF), but MI5’s effort to prevent fascist activities was hampered by the government’s advisory committee on internment. This advisory committee consisted of members who were influential in society, friends of aristocrats and the upper classes. They were there to make decisions about who should be removed from society as a threat to the war effort. But members of the BUF had friends on the committee who frequently recommended the release of their upper-class colleagues despite their fascist sympathies.

 

Pic: Oswald Moseley and the British Union of Fascists (British Library)  

Determined to stop this, MI5 set about forming a fake Gestapo cell. It was led by Eric Roberts, an unassuming-looking bank clerk who worked for the Westminster Bank. Roberts was a former fascist sympathiser, but he had changed allegiance and now became an undercover agent in the BUF.


Roberts was supplied with a fake Gestapo identify card and then assumed the alias of ‘Jack King’, supposedly a German agent who’d been recruited in Britain in early 1939 to compile information on those who would be ‘loyal to the Fatherland’ in the event of Nazi domination.

 

Pic Jack King's Nazi identity Card (National Archive)


Over the next three years, ‘Jack King’ put together a network of hundreds of Nazi supporters. His aim was to channel all the information given to him back to MI5 whilst pretending that this intelligence was being fed back to the Gestapo in Berlin. Jack King maintained his nerve and was able to successfully defuse many of the plans made by Hitler’s supporters in Britain.






Central to the BUF network were two ardent fascists, Marita Perigoe and Hans Kohout, who also feature in The Silk Code. Marita Perigoe had a grudge against the British because her husband Bernard, a committed fascist, had been imprisoned by the internment committee. Marita made herself King’s second-in-command, and unbeknownst to her, MI5 housed her in a specially bugged flat in central London so they could track her conversations and contacts.

In my novel 'The Silk Code' all these characters make an appearance. Spies like Marita provided ‘Jack King’ with maps showing the location of Britain’s petrol and aviation stocks, top secret research on new types of engines for fighter planes, and reports on experimental tanks. Some recruits spied in their home towns for information on possible targets for German bombers, or for sites of military bases and civil defence.

Some were even happy to gloat over the death and injuries caused by air raids, incorrectly putting their success down to intelligence they had provided, when in fact none of the information ever got to Germany.

When Oswald Moseley was released from prison he tried to revive his plans for a fascist Britain, but this failed. So in 1949 Marita Perigoe left England and headed for Australia where she had several further marriages and became a costume designer for theatre.

Marita Perigoe died in 1984, never learning that she had been fooled by ‘Jack King’ in WW2.

Read more about it on the BBC website

Read about Marita in The Telegraph 

 

‘The Silk Code had me absolutely hooked… A great storyline full of bravery, trust, love, survival, betrayal and determination.’ NetGalley reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Based on the true story of ‘Englandspiel’, one woman must race against the clock to uncover a traitor, even if it means losing the man she loves.

Universal Link https://mybook.to/SilkCode

Decoders of the WW2 Special Operations Executive

by Deborah Swift

After the fall of France and Belgium, a new organisation was formed – the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to strengthen subversion and sabotage in occupied territory and behind enemy lines.

To disrupt the enemy, agents sent abroad were charged with destroying railways, utilities such as telephone exchanges, bridges and factories, and then also to organise resistance cells of volunteers from within. Churchill’s famous instruction to Hugh Dalton, the then head of the SOE was to 'set Europe ablaze!'

The SOE headquarters, to train and recruit enemy agents, was in Baker Street in London, and the SOE began to recruit men and women to fill their ranks. One of the roles they needed to fill was that of decoders, women who would try to unscramble the ‘indecipherables’ – messages from agents abroad who had mangled their coding either through fear, pressure or simply forgetfulness.

These women had some skill in puzzle-solving, for example crosswords, but little else in the way of experience. Often they were daughters of someone else in the service, or of a friend or neighbour, as was all top secret and done by word of mouth. In my novel Nancy arrives there because her brother is already working for the SOE.

Women were recruited from all walks of life, the main criteria being that they had the language of the place they would be operating in, and were calm under pressure. The trainers tested them mercilessly, even going so far as to subject the women to enemy-like interrogations and they were rigorously vetted both during recruitment and during training.

 

Leo Marks in his book ‘Between Silk and Cyanide’ details all the methods that were tried to make the codes easier for agents to use. These included the use of poem codes (the agent and his decoder would learn a poem as their crib sheet) to printing on silk with disposable single-use grids of numbers.

The average lifespan of an agent sent abroad by the SOE was a mere six weeks, which means many were caught and killed earlier. In Holland the messages were broken very efficiently by the Germans, and after the first few Dutch agents were captured, it made it easier for German Intelligence to transmit as if they were the agent, getting the key to the code through torture and intimidation. The people at Baker Street were unaware they were decoding messages from the enemy who had infiltrated the resistance.

The agents that were still free were always looking over their shoulder. The slightest mistake, such as transmitting too often, would lead them to be discovered. This fact meant that decoding was a high pressure job. The women in Baker Street were working against the clock to crack the message – and the longer it took, the more likely the agent would send it again and that would put them at risk. Just to hop on the air waves was dangerous, when the German detector vehicles were scouring the area for illegal signals.

In my novel, Nancy goes on to work as an agent, to be the one sending rather than just receiving the radio messages. They were few restrictions on what agents could do, and outside the SOE the organisation became known as the ‘Ministry for Ungentlemanly Conduct’. This was because the SOE was responsible for high profile missions rather than the secretive low profile favoured by the Secret Intelligence Service, usually known as MI6.

For Nancy’s journey I researched the various countryside properties that were requisitioned by the SOE. Remote locations were used, such as the remote Arisaig in the Highlands of Scotland, so that the agents could develop skills in how to kill with their bare hands; the preparing of disguise, how to sabotage a train; and even how to break in and out of buildings by picking the lock with wire. Other country Houses that were used in SOE training included Winterfold House, Cranleigh, and Fulshaw Hall, Cheshire. The latter was the place where agents did parachute training. Several agents were injured during this training which included jumping out of a barrage balloon over a Manchester airfield.

If an agent survived weaponry training and passed the parachute test, they were ready to go behind enemy lines. The agents were assisted on their missions with some James Bond type equipment supplied by ex-film property makers working in an old hotel called The Thatched Barn – special clothing, cases to conceal radio and camera equipment, explosive devices. They also supplied false documents for the agents’ cover stories.

Sir Stewart Menzies head of the Secret Intelligence Service denigrated the SOE as 'amateur, dangerous, and bogus' and eventually the RAF, sick of losing planes to drop agents into Holland, simply refused to lend out their aircraft for these clandestine drops. They would rather drop bombs than agents. Nevertheless, the SOE produced many brave men and women whose actions were courageous, intelligent and awe-inspiring. I hope Nancy Callaghan, my main character helps you experience what life was like for those women who joined.

Read more about Female Spies of the SOE https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/The-Female-Spies-Of-SOE/

See also Seven Stories from SOE agents https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/seven-stories-from-special-operations-executive

Find me at www.deborahswift.com  or on Twitter @swiftstory

What a Difference A Day Makes by Julie Summers

Tomorrow, Wednesday 29 March 2017, is the most significant day in the life of the United Kingdom this century and possibly even of the last forty years. Some go as far as to say it is the most momentous decision taken by this country since the end of the Second World War. Whatever side you are on in the question about whether it is a good or bad thing that Britain is going to leave the European Union, it cannot be denied that invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty is a noteworthy event. The Britain of today will look different in two, five, twenty years time. The anxiety must be what that Britain will look like and how will the changes affect all our futures.

The idyllic Suffolk village of Long Melford, a corner of Old England

As a historian I find momentous and noteworthy events both alarming and exciting. As such I turned back to history to give me some lead on the whole development of the idea of a united Europe and examine what its forefathers had in mind in the immediate aftermath of 1939-45 for the future of a war torn continent. There are many significant players who had a finger in the early version of the European pie but one of the most fascinating from my perspective was a man who had spent the pinnacle of his career training volunteers to enter Nazi occupied Europe and cause mayhem, murder and sabotage. His name was Sir Colin McVean Gubbins. His name may not be familiar to British or American readers but in France, Belgium, Poland, Czech Republic, Norway and the Netherlands he is recognized as a great hero. 

Sir Colin McVean Gubbins KCMG

Born in Tokyo in 1896 he was sent, aged seven, to live with his maternal grandparents on the Isle of Mull. He did not see his father or mother for five years but he described his childhood as blissfully happy. After school he attended the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and in the summer of 1914 he was in Heidelberg learning German. In August had to make a frantic dash back to Britain to avoid arrest. He succeeded by disguising himself as a child and later wrote: ‘My escape from being imprisoned in Germany was entirely due to the kindness of the Englishman, a complete stranger, who lent me £1 on Cologne platform.’ Gubbins was at Ypres for the first and second battles, then on the Somme where he won his Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry. He was shot in the neck on the Somme in October and was in hospital for eleven days; he was gassed in 1917 and suffered from trench fever in April 1918 but was fit enough to join General Ironside, later commander-in-chief of the Home Forces, as ADC on the autumn mission to Archangel in Russia to prepare a winter campaign. After the war, then aged twenty-three, Gubbins was sent to Ireland where he was given a three day course in guerrilla warfare and observed the methods used by the nationalists at first-hand. In 1923 he learned Russian and then went to India to learn Urdu.

Promoted to major in February 1934, he was posted to the War Office and appointed GS02 in a new section of MTI (Military Training Instruction), which was the policy making arm of the Military Training Directorate. In this role he was sent in 1938 to Czechoslovakia to oversee the withdrawal of Czech forces from the Sudetenland. It was something that he found exceptionally repugnant and it remained a matter of lasting shame to him for the rest of his life. It also gave him a first-hand view of the brutal force of Nazi expansion.

In the summer of 1940, after the fall of France, the invasion of Britain seemed imminent. Gubbins was put in charge of training stay-behind parties of men who would work locally to sabotage Germans stores, blow up bridges and generally slow down their advance parties. When the threat of invasion lessened he was transferred to a new section called Special Operations Executive, known by its nickname Baker Street which was the London HQ. Its aim was to train foreign fighters who would be sent back to their own countries to carry out secret missions.

Arisaig House, HQ of  SOE Special Training Schools

He moved to the Highlands to set up Special Training Schools where agents from occupied countries could be trained in the brutal arts of guerrilla or, as Churchill called it, ungentlemanly warfare. Men and women were turned into silent killers, explosives experts, radio operators and sabotage agents who were parachuted into France, Belgium, Poland, the Czech Republic, Norway and so on to carry out their secret and often deadly work. Gubbins worked with SOE for the whole war and clocked up some notable successes in Norway, France and, most spectacularly, in the Czech Republic when two agents trained in the Highlands carried out the successful assassination of Acting Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in May 1942. The reprisals for the murder of Germans was hideous but the heads of the various governments-in-exile in London thought the boost to a country’s morale and the confirmation that they had not been forgotten was a price worth paying.

Jozef Gabcik (left) and Jan Kubis who were responsible
for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942

At the end of the war Gubbins’ department was shut down. His biographer wrote of him:

Britain was spared the shame and misery of enemy occupation; without this experience it is difficult to appreciate the part played by clandestine resistance both in restoring national self-respect and in permitting courageous individuals to escape from the ignominy of their situation. . . It was as a resistance leader that he came to fashion Special Operations Executive, and to write his own page in the history of almost every country occupied by the enemy in the Second World War.

So respected was he in the countries that had been occupied by the Nazis that the government had to waive the rule that an officer could receive only four foreign honours for services in the war. Eventually he received more fourteen awards including the highest from Norway, Denmark, Greece, France, Poland, Belgium and the United States of America. Gubbins received a knighthood in 1946 and began the second half of his life’s work, which was to promote European Unity. Despite the fact he had spent five years trying to devise every possible lethal means of undermining the Germans, he realized that the only way of securing a lasting peace in Europe was to work together.

In 1946 an old Polish friend, Josef Retinger, asked him to help set up the Independent League for Economic Cooperation in Brussels. This was merged with various others in 1947 to become the International Committee of the Movement for European Unity with Churchill’s son-in-law, Duncan Sandys as chairman. In 1954 he was asked to represent Britain as a founder member of the Bilderberg Group, an organisation set up to promote a strengthening of US-European relations and preventing another world war. When asked what he considered to be his greatest achievement he said the role he had been most honoured to play was in helping to prevent a further war.

Gubbins died in 1976 at the age of eighty, by which time Britain had been a full member of the European Union for three years. I wonder what he would think of the step his country is about to take on 29 March 2017.

Gubbins' story will be told in full in my next book Behind Closed Doors. It will be published in spring 2018.

Setting Europe Ablaze, by Y S Lee

In December, I introduced you to my historical boyfriend, Freddy Spencer Chapman. Since then, my research has led me to the more general history of SOE, the Special Operations Executive that operated parallel to – and sometimes in conflict with – established military intelligence during the Second World War.

Chances are, you’ve heard bits and pieces about SOE’s exploits in both fact and fiction. Historian M R D Foot says it was “formed in a tearing hurry during the summer crisis of 1940, at Churchill’s direct prompting” and dismantled in 1946. Churchill’s actual directive was for SOE to “set Europe ablaze”. Now, looking back, what reader or writer could resist such an invitation? Even better, because the organization no longer exists, its six years of secrets can be fully explored without endangering lives. Finally, there’s the romance of it all: clandestine recruitment of a diverse and international group of volunteers who didn’t know what they’d be doing, but were willing to perform “duties of a hazardous nature”.

SOE’s work is at the centre of recent novels like Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name: Verity, William Boyd’s Restless, and many others. I’ve recently been reading some non-fiction sources in an absolute fever of excitement. Currently, I have SOE and the Resistance: As told in the Times Obituaries (ed. Michael Tillotson, 2011) and Forgotten Voices of the Secret War: An Inside History of Special Operations in the Second World War (ed. Roderick Bailey, 2008). Today, I want to share a few highlights in hopes of enticing you to join me.

Einar Skinnarland (Norwegian, 1918-2002)

image via snipview

Skinnarland was an engineer at a hydroelectric plant in German-occupied Norway that was scheduled to produce heavy water for the Nazi plutonium project. In May 1940, Skinnarland took a one-month leave from his job at the plant, joined a group of young Norwegians who hijacked a coastal steamer, and sailed it to Aberdeen to offer their services to the Allies. He brought with him detailed information about the plant’s security systems and volunteered to return for a sabotage operation. After “very basic” parachute training, the RAF dropped Skinnarland back into the Norwegian mountains, in good time for his return to work after a “holiday”! Skinnarland and his associate, Knut Haukelid, spent several months training resisters in the mountains and their group succeeded in sinking Germany’s stocks of heavy water in Lake Tinnsjo in February 1944 – a major contribution to the end of Hitler’s hopes for an atomic bomb.

image via wikipedia

Jos Gemmeke (Dutch, 1922-2010)
As a teenaged girl in the occupied Netherlands, Gemmeke volunteered to distribute copies of a resistance newspaper. The penalty for being caught with even a single copy on one’s person was death, and Gemmeke ran this risk daily for more than four years. She also couriered messages for the Dutch resistance, on bicycle, hiding the microfilms in her shoulder pads. On one journey, while attempting to cross the River Waal, a German soldier informed her that the bridge was closed. As she tried to persuade him to let her cross, Allied aircraft strafed the bridge. The German soldiers dived for cover and Gemmeke was free to cycle across, working her way through the front lines, and delivering the microfilms to newly liberated Brussels.

Pearl Witherington (English, 1914-2008)

image via wikipedia

When Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940, Witherington, who was born to English parents and raised in France, was forced to make her own way to England, from Spain to Portugal and then through Gibraltar. Once she found SOE, her instructors were impressed, if patronizing: “This student, although a woman, has got leader’s qualities. Cool, resourceful, and extremely determined. Very capable, completely brave.” Witherington parachuted back into occupied France to work a courier between different SOE “circuits”. When the Gestapo arrested the head of her circuit, Witherington was given control of the northern half of the circuit. She armed French Resisters, gave them weapons training, and ambushed German convoys of military vehicles. After the war, she settled in the area where she’d led her circuit.


Ibrahim bin Ismail (Malayan, 1922-2010)

image via wikipedia

After the debacle that was the British “defense” of the Malayan peninsula in 1941-42, SOE turned its attention to recruiting local resistance to the occupying Japanese army. The Malayan Communist Party was staunchly anti-Japanese, but their politics made the British nervous. In Ibrahim, SOE found a perfect recruit: an existing officer in the Indian Army willing to infiltrate his homeland. After two failed attempts at a coastal landing, Ibrahim’s party successfully reached the shore in kayaks, only to be welcomed by Japanese soldiers. Under interrogation, Ibrahim persuaded the Japanese that he would prefer to work with them. As evidence, he offered to radio a message to SOE headquarters. In the message, Ibrahim gave the wrong answer to his safety check question, thus alerting headquarters that he was in Japanese hands. For the remaining ten months of the war, SOE used Ibrahim to feed the Japanese false information.

Noor Inayat Khan (Indian/American, 1914-1944)

The daughter of an Indian father and an American mother, Khan declared to SOE that while she loathed the Nazis and wanted to defeat them, her first loyalty was to India. Her recruiting officer noted that hers was the sole case in which “a loyalty was not directly British”. As Khan was fluent in French and already working as a WAAF wireless operator, SOE trained her only briefly. Six weeks after Khan’s arrival in France, hundreds of other resistance workers in her circuit were arrested. As the only radio operator still free in Paris, Khan continued to work, limiting message transmission to 20 minutes per location, and moving constantly in order to evade detection. She was betrayed to the Germans by a double agent within SOE. During her month-long interrogation, she lied consistently, gave up no secrets, and twice attempted escape. After her third effort to escape, Khan was transferred to Germany as a Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) prisoner – that is, to disappear without a trace. There, although kept shackled and in solitary confinement for ten months, she was able to communicate her name and London address to another inmate. She was executed and her body burned in 1944, and was still officially classed as “missing” in 1946.

These are just five of the astounding volunteers of the Special Operations Executive. I've deliberately chosen individuals from diverse places, to show the breadth of SOE's remit: Churchill may have thought primarily of Europe, but SOE operated the world over (with the exceptions of Russia and Japan). Three of the five here are women because women were particularly active in SOE, especially in its French Section. But there are hundreds of others whose stories keep me up late at night and change the way I think of the Second World War. I hope the same is true for you, too.