Home-grown terrorists equipped by a foreign power are not a new phenomenon. During the Second World War, Hitler's Germany made sustained efforts to inflict a terror campaign on the streets of Britain through the use of secret agents and agents provocateurs. The aim was to blow up military, industrial, transport and telecommunication targets, to lower morale among the civilian population and disrupt the war effort. Even before the outbreak of war, the Nazis provided the IRA with assistance for their plan to sabotage the British mainland. Prior to their planned invasion in the summer of 1940, the Nazis were also keen to recruit members of the Welsh and Scottish Nationalist Parties to engage in sabotaging British targets and, over the course of the war, infiltrated dozens of trained agents from countries including Norway, Denmark, Holland, France and Cuba. What happened to the myriad plots to blow up Britain? We know that intelligence obtained from decrypted enemy messages via Bletchley Park and double agents like ZIGZAG, SUMMER and TATE alerted MI5 to some of these spies' arrivals, but what about the others? And how successful were MI5's efforts to fake acts of sabotage and arrange media coverage to fool the enemy into thinking their agents were still at large and on task? In this book, Bernard O'Connor, a noted wartime espionage historian, tells the complete story of the successes and failures of the Nazi terror offensive on mainland Britain during 1938-1944.

This book investigates the role played by William Donovan, the OSS mission in London and the Carpetbaggers, the US Squadron which was sent to RAF Tempsford to be trained by the 'Moon Squadrons' before undertaking their own missions from Harrington. Not only does it describe the work of pilots and crew members, it also details some of the missions and gives insight into their social life. It includes the story of Owen Johnson and Elizabeth Devereaux Rochester, the first American agents to be parachuted into France, and Juup Kappius, Hilde Meisel and Ann Bayer, the first OSS agents to be sent into Germany before the invasion.

Nearly forty female agents were sent out by the French section of Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. The youngest was 19 and the oldest 53. Most were trained in paramilitary warfare, fieldcraft, the use of weapons and explosives, sabotage, silent killing, parachuting, codes and cyphers, wireless transmission and receiving, and general spycraft. These women - as well as others from clandestine Allied organisations - were flown out and parachuted or landed into France on vital and highly dangerous missions: their task, to work with resistance movements both before and after D-Day. Bernard O'Connor uses recently declassified government documents, personnel files, mission reports and memoirs to assess the successes and failures of the 38 women including Odette Sansom, Denise Colin, and Cecile Pichard. Of the twelve who were captured, only two survived; the others were executed, some after being tortured by the sadistic officers of the Gestapo. This is their story.