by Lynne Olson
By mid-1941, a growing number of Europeans had overcome their initial sense of shock and helplessness and had begun to embrace more overt signs of passive resistance, as demonstrated by the success of the BBC’s V campaign. Still, incidents of active rebellion were extremely rare. Until the people of Europe were willing to take direct action themselves, SOE could accomplish very little.
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ACTUALLY, IT WAS PROBABLY just as well that widespread underground activities were not yet taking shape in the early years of the war. If they had been, SOE would have been unable to provide the resources—both human and material—necessary to keep any such flicker of insurgency alive.
Another of the new agency’s myriad difficulties was the fact that the officials who had created it had not provided it with the means needed to carry out its mission. It was forced to rely on other government agencies, most of which were opposed to its very existence, for such essentials as communications and transport for its operatives.
MI6, not surprisingly, remained SOE’s fiercest opponent. The two competed bitterly throughout the war in their efforts to recruit agents from among European troops in Britain, as well as from the thousands of young foreigners who fetched up there each year. They also fought each other for the use of scarce transportation resources, particularly RAF aircraft, to ferry their operatives (and, in SOE’s case, weapons, ammunition, and other equipment) to Europe. The RAF preferred not to use its planes for anything but its bombing campaign against Germany, but when it reluctantly did allocate them for other uses, it tended to assign them to MI6, sharing the intelligence agency’s belief that SOE was “an ungentlemanly body it was better to keep clear of.”
Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, the head of the British air staff, bluntly made that point when he wrote to a senior SOE official in early 1941, “I think that the dropping of men dressed in civilian clothes for the purpose of attempting to kill members of the opposing forces is not an operation with which the Royal Air Force should be associated. I think you will agree that there is a vast difference in ethics between the time-honoured operation of the dropping of a spy from the air and this entirely new scheme for dropping what one can only call assassins.” (Interestingly, Portal’s public school fastidiousness about the ethics of killing did not seem to carry over to Bomber Command’s area bombing of German cities later in the war, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.)
Adding to SOE’s woes was its creators’ decision that it must use MI6’s signals and coding systems to communicate with its agents. Furthermore, any intelligence that SOE received had to be sent straight to Claude Dansey, which ensured that MI6 always knew far more about SOE and its operations than SOE knew about MI6. Dansey and Stewart Menzies, both highly skilled bureaucratic infighters, used that knowledge in their ceaseless struggle to bring the upstart new agency under their control or, failing that, to kill it outright.
For the remainder of the war, SOE and MI6, known by SOE staffers as “the bastards of Broadway,” engaged in “full-scale and dangerous brawls the like of which Whitehall bureaucracy had rarely if ever seen before,” as one historian put it. Malcolm Muggeridge, a bemused witness to the bureaucratic mayhem, later wrote, “Though SOE and MI6 were nominally on the same side in the war, they were, generally speaking, more abhorrent to one another than the [Germans] were to either of them.”
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NOT UNTIL FEBRUARY 15, 1941, eight months after SOE’s creation, did it infiltrate its first agents into occupied Europe. The target country, fittingly, was Poland. After months of wrangling with MI6 and the RAF, SOE was finally able to obtain the services of a single aircraft—a slow, cumbersome, obsolescent Whitley bomber—to carry three Polish parachutists and several crates of weapons more than nine hundred miles to a location not far from Warsaw. The fourteen-hour round-trip journey was, as one SOE official noted, an “extraordinary feat of navigation and endurance, flying blind across occupied Europe in the depths of winter, finding the parachute zone and making it back” to Britain.
Hugh Dalton was elated by the mission’s success in dropping the men and weapons, as was the Polish government in exile. Dalton and the Poles began planning for a series of regular flights to supply agents, weapons, ammunition, and other equipment to the Polish Home Army as it mounted sabotage operations against the Germans and prepared for an open revolt later in the war.
In their enthusiasm, however, neither Dalton nor the Poles realized that the flight had actually been a Pyrrhic victory, highlighting the enormous logistical difficulties of air operations to Poland. To reach that country, British bombers had had to cross hundreds of miles of German-occupied territory, braving antiaircraft fire and enemy fighter planes along the entire route. Another significant obstacle was the weather. Even if skies were clear in Britain and over the North Sea when the bombers took off, there were often clouds or rain over Poland, making drops or landings highly problematic. And with the flights taking up to fourteen hours, the bombers’ fuel reserves were so limited that even the slightest navigational mistake could be disastrous.
Colin Gubbins and his planning and operations staff were faced with a catch-22 situation: the Poles were by far the most active resisters in Europe, but the logistics of supplying them were considered too difficult for frequent flights. In the future, political considerations would also play a major role in the eventual decision by British policy makers to concentrate on SOE missions closer to home, particularly in France and the Low Countries and later in Yugoslavia.
While Gubbins understood and reluctantly agreed with that reasoning, he could not bring himself “to discourage the Poles from planning operations on the greatest scale,” Gubbins’s biographer wrote. As a result, the Home Army continued its preparations for a mass uprising against the Germans, unaware that the British had abandoned any idea of helping them. The stage was set for disaster.
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THOUGH SOE MAY HAVE been laggardly in carrying out its mandate in the first year of its existence, it was not at all slow in expanding its bureaucratic empire. In October 1940, the rapidly growing staff moved from St. Ermin’s Hotel to a large modern office building at 64 Baker Street, just down the road from Sherlock Holmes’s fictional lodgings. Within a month, that location was full, and five neighboring buildings were commandeered to house all of SOE’s country sections, which soon included not only western and eastern Europe but also the Balkans and the Middle East.
In Scotland and the north of England, several large country estates were requisitioned for the training of agents. Country sections also maintained a number of apartments in west London neighborhoods such as South Kensington and Marylebone, where agents were interviewed, briefed, and sometimes housed without ever knowing where SOE’s main offices were.
As with MI6, a dense aura of secrecy enveloped SOE’s operations. Almost no one outside the organization, except for a relatively few high government officials, even knew it existed. No version of its name ever appeared in the London phone directory, and its heavily guarded buildings were adorned with brass plaques bearing vague cover names, such as “Inter Services Research Bureau.” There were no nameplates on the doors of its offices. Although most of the European country sections were in the same building, they had almost no contact with one another, thanks to an SOE rule forbidding any sharing of information between sections.
In this new, unwieldy fiefdom, there was a topsy-turvy atmosphere from the very start. With no prior knowledge or understanding of clandestine operations, most SOE staffers were making things up as they went along. “Of course, it was amateurish,” a staffer said. “We were all amateurs doing our best. There was nobody there who was a professional anything.” When one SOE officer was asked by a colleague why he had adopted “White Rabbit” as a code name, the officer replied, “I work for a fucking mad hatter’s tea party. Can you think of a better reason?”
Other than Colin Gubbins’s pamphlet, SOE had no guidelines to follow in setting up its trai
ning in the arts of “ungentlemanly warfare.” As Lord Selborne, who replaced Hugh Dalton as SOE’s ministerial overseer in 1942, acknowledged, “Underground warfare was an unknown art in England….There were no textbooks for newcomers, no old hands to initiate one into the experiences of the last war….Lessons had to be learned in the hard school of practice.”
Because of the need for secrecy, SOE employed no advertising or other public means of searching for potential agents. Instead, staffers combed the ranks of émigrés and made discreet approaches to British friends and acquaintances for the names of people fluent in at least one foreign language who might be interested in “special foreign service.” “Entry into SOE was so largely a matter of accident that there was nothing which deserved the name of a recruiting system,” observed the historian M.R.D. Foot. When potential agents were approached, they were told virtually nothing about what the job would entail. “Interviewers,” said one SOE officer, “were under orders not to disclose the function of SOE or even its name.”
Francis Cammaerts, the Cambridge-educated, French-speaking son of an eminent Belgian art historian and poet, recalled that at one point during his interview with SOE, an official vaguely suggested that he might be able to use his French in North Africa. “The idea that I would go into occupied France didn’t even occur to me,” he said. “I didn’t know that anyone was doing that sort of thing.” Cammaerts, who would become one of SOE’s top agents in France, added, “The name SOE was never mentioned. I never heard those initials until after the war.” Indeed, many recruits believed they were joining MI6.
When it came to the selection and training of agents, those headed for Poland and Czechoslovakia were handled far differently than those assigned to Norway, the Low Countries, and France. Because both the Poles and Czechs had functioning resistance movements that predated SOE’s creation, the agency exerted much less control over their operations, confining itself to providing transport and communications facilities, along with parachute, weapons, and other specialized training. The Polish and Czech governments in exile were responsible for selecting the SOE agents from their countries, most of whom were already highly trained veterans of their military branches.
In the case of Norway, SOE was responsible for choosing the agents, all of whom were Norwegian; in that country’s small, intimate, and closed society, foreigners, even those who spoke Norwegian well, would have been dangerously obvious. Conducted in the mountains of Scotland, the Norwegians’ training was paramilitary in nature, focusing on commando work and on learning to survive for weeks, if not months, in harsh, remote, wintry terrain akin to that of the agents’ homeland. “Even hardened Norwegians found survival tough in those conditions,” noted an observer. “Few British agents would have made it.”
Agents selected to work in Holland and Belgium were also, for the most part, natives of their countries. By contrast, the agents sent to France were an astonishingly diverse group, coming from a wide variety of nations and social backgrounds that ranged from pimps to princesses. They included businessmen, teachers, journalists, a Vogue fashion artist, a traveling acrobat, the former head of a Paris fashion house, and a receptionist from a hotel in London’s West End. Besides speaking French, the one thing that almost all of them had in common was that, like much of the staff that selected them, they were rank amateurs in the business of war.
The agents who made it through the first stages of screening were sent to various remote country houses (each country section had its own house) for rigorous physical training. If they passed that hurdle, they were dispatched to another country estate for military training, which involved learning how to use pistols, grenades, and other small arms. At that point, most of them still had no idea what potentially lay in store for them. Only if they made it to the third round of training, which taught them the basics of survival in an enemy-controlled country, were they told they had been selected for drops into occupied Europe.
As SOE prepared these operatives to lead clandestine lives, their instructors were handicapped by knowing almost nothing about the current conditions in occupied Europe. There also was little information about German methods of detecting and suppressing individuals who opposed them. As a result, SOE staffers were just guessing “at the sorts of things they were instructing us on,” Francis Cammaerts said. “They were trying to teach us something that they themselves didn’t know.”
Cammaerts—who was later caught by the Gestapo in France, only to be rescued by a female SOE colleague just hours before he was to be executed—made clear after the war that the gentlemanly British were unequipped to prepare agents for the real-life savagery of the enemy. During his final round of training, he, like other prospective operatives, had been pulled out of bed in the middle of the night and interrogated by SOE instructors in Gestapo uniforms. In retrospect, he said, “that was pretty useless. You couldn’t have them doing [what the Gestapo did], such as pulling out fingernails.” His faux German interrogators, Cammaerts added, were “very severe and asked really hard questions—but that was not what it was like. Those likely to know exactly what happened under such circumstances were hardly likely to have survived.”
SOE spent a great deal of time and energy trying to make sure that agents could pass muster with the false identities they were given before they were dispatched to Europe. They were provided with forged identity cards and other documents, as well as the kinds of clothing and other personal effects worn and used by residents of the countries to which they were sent. Above all, they were told, they must never draw attention to themselves. Instead, they should do everything possible to blend into the background.
Not infrequently, though, SOE itself was responsible for making such unobtrusiveness impossible. One agent, newly arrived in France, was on a train when a Frenchwoman turned to him and said, “Oh, I love your shoes. My brother bought shoes exactly the same as yours in London.” The agent later remarked, “Can you imagine how I felt? I’d barely been in France a couple of hours and I’d already been noticed because my shoes were conspicuous, because at that time you couldn’t buy leather in France.”
For an agent, the key element in keeping a low profile was an impeccable command of the language of the country to which he or she was sent. Yet a number of the operatives dispatched to France were known for their mangling of the language or for speaking it fluently with a strong foreign accent.
While such blunders and oversights were due in part to SOE’s amateurishness, they were also attributable to an increasingly anxious, frenetic atmosphere within the agency. Having little or nothing to show for its first year of operation, SOE was under intense pressure from Whitehall, especially from its foes in MI6, to justify its existence. In its hurry to produce results, it was not as thorough and careful as it should have been in the screening and preparation of agents. Indeed, it sometimes sent operatives into action who should never have been dispatched at all.
One startling example was an agent headed for Belgium, who, during his training, had been rated as “absolutely appalling” by SOE security officials. They noted his “fondness for drink,” irresponsibility with money, and a tendency to pick up “the most awful women.” These negatives were ignored by SOE’s Belgian section, which sent the man to Brussels anyway. Within days, he had picked up a peroxided blonde and taken her to a prominent hotel that was “absolutely stiff with the Gestapo.” His arrest soon followed, which, according to an SOE official, resulted in the arrest and execution of eighteen members of the Belgian resistance.
Another red-flag agent was an exotic twenty-six-year-old WAAF officer named Noor Inayat Khan, whose father came from Indian Muslim nobility and whose mother, an American, hailed from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Born in Moscow, Khan had grown up in London and Paris, where she had studied piano at the Paris Conservatory under the famed composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger.
Maurice Buckmaster, the head of SOE’s F [French] Section, described Khan as “a sensitive, somewhat dreamy girl” with a pencha
nt for absentmindedness. In a fitness report, one of her instructors wrote that she “tends to give far too much information. Came here without the foggiest idea what she was being trained for.” Two SOE colleagues who trained with her urged Buckmaster not to send her to France. The officer in charge of instructing her and other would-be operatives in survival tactics wrote that she was “temperamentally unsuitable” to be an agent and would be a major security risk in the field. He based that judgment in part on a mock interrogation of Khan by a Bristol police superintendent, whose force worked with SOE. After the interrogation, the superintendent informed the agency that “if this girl’s an agent, I’m Winston Churchill.” Despite all the warnings, Khan was dispatched to France as a wireless operator—the most difficult and dangerous job an agent could be assigned. She was later caught up in one of SOE’s biggest fiascoes of the war.
Years after the conflict, Major Hermann Giskes, an Abwehr officer in wartime Holland and arguably SOE’s most successful German adversary, had some harsh words for “the amateurish way the British had gone about organizing SOE. They built it up too hastily and set in motion a machinery which was too vast, too ambitious, for the means at their disposal. SOE needed professional intelligence officers at its head, as we had in the Abwehr, and in particular it needed men adept at subversive warfare. Instead they sent us infants, keen and willing, but quite unfitted for that kind of combat.”
For the first three years of SOE operations, Giskes’s unsparing analysis was undoubtedly correct, at least in regard to France, Belgium, and Holland. Later the agency began to learn from its mistakes and ended up having a significant impact on the war in those countries. But its early seat-of-the-pants approach came at an appalling cost: the deaths of dozens of agents, not to mention the hundreds of Europeans who lost their lives by working with often unqualified and ill-prepared SOE officers in resisting the enemy.
