Ebb and Flow of Wartime Intelligence

Rupert Allason—most commonly known by his pen name, Nigel West—has had an impressive writing career, with more than 30 books focusing on intelligence and espionage. To be sure, West’s breadth of understanding of our British allies is uncommonly granular, and Secret War: The Story of SOE Britain’s Wartime Sabotage Organization—one of his most recent volumes—is a case in point. In Secret War, West describes a reality of wartime chaos marked by heroism, betrayal, error, and concession that was eclipsed in a postwar world more interested in a sanitized narrative of valor lest those rebuilding a devastated Europe be scandalized by their wartime compromises. The core Special Operations Executive (SOE) was sired in 1940 from the “black propaganda” organization known as Electra House and Branch “D” of the Secret Intelligence Service (Military Intelligence 6 [MI6] or SIS), responsible for sabotage. The core of 140 intelligence officers would serve under three SOE executive directors and eventually manage a cadre of 9,000 agents that would attempt to implement Winston Churchill’s admonition to “set Europe ablaze” across the whole of the British war effort from Scandinavia to Asia. In the summer of 1940, the Sitzkrieg ended, and the Wehrmacht drove through the Ardennes, thundered across France—stunning the Western allies and creating havoc as the British SIS infrastructure in France and its “Z” network dissolved as quickly as the Maginot Line. SIS Section D was then little more than an unfunded paper organization, rescued by an Americanborn British tycoon named Chester Beatty, who provided seed monies out of his personal resources to get things off the ground. Section D began coordinating with MI (R or Research),