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RAF Tempsford, a remote Second World War airfield between Cambridge
and Bedford, was designed by an illusionist to give over-flying
enemy pilots the impression it was a disused airfield. Home to the
RAF's Special Duties Squadrons, it was only used on the clear
nights on either side of the full moon. Flying low and without
lights, brave pilots and aircrews carried many hundreds of tons of
arms and supplies to resistance groups north of the Arctic Circle,
east to Czechoslovakia and Poland, southeast to the Balkans and
south as far as the Pyrenees and Italy. 'The Tempsford Academy'
tells the story of William Stephenson, the man sent by Roosevelt to
assess Britain's potential to resist German invasion in 1940, his
meeting the men running Britain's secret service and being shown
round SOE's training facilities, weapons, R&D sites etc. He
persuaded the President to send William Donovan, subsequent head of
OSS (what became the CIA), to see how the Americans could establish
an intelligence network in London. Offices were set up in London
and establishments for the training and deployment of US secret
agents into occupied Europe as well as assisting the SOE in
supplying the resistance. Until an airfield was built for their
clandestine operations, agents were flown out from RAF Tempsford:
Churchill's Most Secret Airfield.
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.
Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941,
Churchill and Stalin secretly agreed that Britain would infiltrate
Soviet agents into occupied Western Europe. Liaison began between
the NKVD and the SOE, each country's secret service. Transported in
convoys across the Arctic Ocean and often attacked by German
U-Boats, thirty-four men and women arrived in Scotland. To stop
people finding out that Britain was helping the Communists, the
agents were given false identities and provided with accommodation
and training at remote country houses in southern England,
including Beaulieu. Codenamed PICKAXES, they were sent for
parachute practice at Ringway aerodrome, provided with documents,
cover stories and wireless sets and sent on clandestine missions
into France, Belgium, Holland, Austria, Germany and Italy. Whilst
most were sent from RAF Tempsford, Churchill's Most Secret
airfield, one was sent by boat across the Channel and another by
submarine into Northern Italy. Only a few survived the war as most
were caught, interrogated and executed. Based on extensive
research, Bernard O'Connor tells their human stories enmeshed in a
web of political intrigue and diplomacy.
During the Second World War, the German Intelligence Service
infiltrated specially-trained agents into Iceland to collect
military, naval, aviation and meteorological intelligence to be
transmitted back to Hamburg by wireless or secret writing. Some
agents managed to evade capture for a few weeks but most handed
themselves into the authorities shortly after landing. Sent to
London for interrogation by MI5, rather than be executed as enemy
spies, they revealed their life stories and provided details of
their training, their instructors and how they were infiltrated.
They included Olev Saetrang, Ib Riis, Sigurjon Jonsson, Jens
Palsson, Peter Thomsen aka Jens Fridriksson, Larus Thorsteinsson,
Einar Sigvaldason, Magnus Gudbjornsson, Sverrir Matthiasson, Ernst
Fresenius, Sigurdur Juliusson, Hjalti Bjornsson and Gudbrandur
Hlidar. Three of these spies were 'turned', used as double agents
to transmit British-inspired messages to deceive the Germans about
Arctic convoys and a fake Allied invasion of Norway.
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