Introduction: Special Operations Executive – New Approaches and Perspectives

The secret scalpel: plastic surgery for wartime disguise

The recruitment of women into the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War marked a significant yet complex shift in British intelligence. While wartime necessity expanded opportunities for women in espionage, their recruitment remained shaped by entrenched gender biases. Women were scrutinised more heavily than their male counterparts, expected to meet higher linguistic and cultural standards, and often assessed based on their perceived ability to ‘pass’ unnoticed in occupied France. Drawing on primary sources, including archival material from the Imperial War Museum – and engaging with historiographical insights, this article examines the intersection of gender and operational necessity in SOE recruitment. It argues that while the SOE adapted to the demands of war by integrating women into covert roles, their inclusion remained constrained by societal expectations. Ultimately, while the SOE offered women unprecedented opportunities in military intelligence, their recruitment and assessment reflected broader societal constraints, highlighting both the evolving possibilities and persistent limitations of women’s roles in wartime espionage.

This article will survey the activities of Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Sweden during the course of the Second World War. Under the constraints of a foreign policy that sought to gradually encourage the government of Sweden to become more pro-allied rather than pro-axis and ‘non-belligerent’, SOE nonetheless entered Sweden with hopes of developing a series of contacts with groups and individuals that could be turned into active resistance if Sweden joined the axis, or if Nazi Germany either invaded or occupied Sweden and the whole of Scandinavia. Once the possibility of an axis invasion of Sweden was decisively dismissed, SOE had to find a different role. In Sweden, the successful development of SOE's intelligence gathering capabilities in the economic sphere, especially in the allied campaign against German iron-ore traffic and ball-bearings, provided the organization with a purpose that definitely took another course when compared to intelligence activities in other regions and countries. With these constraints in view, this article focuses on three major aspects of SOE involvement in Sweden. First, the article will examine SOE's role, and war aims in Sweden, linking these to the very different requirements of the Foreign Office. Second, the article will explore British and Swedish intelligence relations. Third, it will consider the Swedish security police response to British intelligence.

In the years immediately following World War II, information was disclosed about what has been termed the shadow war of the existence of hitherto secret agencies. In Germany it was the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst; in Britain it was MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and Special Operations Executive (SOE); in the United States it was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Special Intelligence Service (SIS) of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); in Japan it was the Kempet'ai; and in Italy the Servicio di Informazione Militare (SIM). Sixty years after World War II secrets are still being revealed about the covert activities that took place. Many countries had secret agencies maintaining covert operations, but even ostensibly neutral countries also conducted secret operations. Changes in American, British, and even Soviet official attitudes to declassification in the 1980s allowed thousands of secret documents to be made available for public examination, and the result was extensive revisionism of the conventional histories of the conflict, which previously had excluded references to secret intelligence sources. The Historical Dictionary of World War II Intelligence tells the emerging history of the intelligence world during World War II. This is done through a chronology, an introduction, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on the secret agencies, operations, and events. The world of double agents, spies, and moles during WWII is explained in the most comprehensive reference currently available.

In the years immediately following World War II, information was disclosed about what has been termed the shadow war of the existence of hitherto secret agencies. In Germany it was the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst; in Britain it was MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and Special Operations Executive (SOE); in the United States it was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Special Intelligence Service (SIS) of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); in Japan it was the Kempet'ai; and in Italy the Servicio di Informazione Militare (SIM). Sixty years after World War II secrets are still being revealed about the covert activities that took place. Many countries had secret agencies maintaining covert operations, but even ostensibly neutral countries also conducted secret operations. Changes in American, British, and even Soviet official attitudes to declassification in the 1980s allowed thousands of secret documents to be made available for public examination, and the result was extensive revisionism of the conventional histories of the conflict, which previously had excluded references to secret intelligence sources. TheHistorical Dictionary of World War II Intelligencetells the emerging history of the intelligence world during World War II. This is done through a chronology, an introduction, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on the secret agencies, operations, and events. The world of double agents, spies, and moles during WWII is explained in the most comprehensive reference currently available.

In 1943, the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) launched one of the Allied intelligence services' biggest efforts to foster resistance within Nazi Germany in cooperation with Slovene partisans in the Carinthian borderland. The so-called Clowder Mission systematically supplied weapons and other military assistance to the partisans who, in summer and autumn 1944, offered the strongest – albeit often neglected by scholars – militant resistance within the borders of Nazi Germany. Although SOE's operational aim of externally fomenting Austrian separatist, patriotic resistance deeper inside the country failed, its strategic aim of assisting the separation of Austria from Germany and re-establishing an independent Austrian nation-state proved to be sound. At the same time, the Carinthian Slovene partisans fell short of attaining their political objectives. This article analyses the paradoxical results of British subversive politics towards Austria and Slovenia. It traces the impact of the SOE's agenda and the origins of the Moscow Declaration on the reestablishment of Austria, and elaborates on the character of British-Slovene cooperation, its success and its breakdown in the context of British subversive politics, inter-Allied rivalries and competition, and the geopolitics of resistance.

De Gaulle's relationship with his secret intelligence and subversive services, the Bureau central de renseignements et d'action (BCRA) headed by Colonel Passy, as well as with British intelligence is examined in the light of the now declassified archives of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the BCRA. These archives reveal that de Gaulle failed to interest himself seriously in secret intelligence or subversion before the arrival of Jean Moulin in London in October 1941. De Gaulle's subsequent relationship with the BCRA and British intelligence was defined by an obsessive need for political control, which only served to compromise the BCRA's otherwise successful collaboration with British intelligence.

This article examines the work of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Spain during the latter part of the Second World War. Unlike SOE's broad mandate to sow dissent and disarray in occupied countries, in Spain agents were forbidden from any involvement in direct action and sabotage. Diplomatic concerns, namely the maintenance of Spanish neutrality in the war, overrode all other strategic issues in Iberia. SOE agents and leaders in Madrid, therefore, attempted to create a different role for themselves. Drawing on files released in the Public Record Office in 1998, the article highlights SOE's limited success in the effort to establish for itself a part in the Allied strategic and diplomatic campaign against German wolfram smuggling. Success proved fleeting, however, and SOE's ultimate failure, in the face of hostility from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), to prove its usefulness beyond the wolfram campaign, would lead to its withdrawal from Spain. The story of the SOE in Spain represents, on a small scale, the failure of the organization to find a niche in the British intelligence community after the Second World War.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the phenomenon of fakery and the rise of impostors claiming to have been former secret agents of the special operations executive (SOE). Since the early 1950s, a growing interest in tales of SOE’s exploits, combined with an inconsistent Whitehall position regarding disclosure about the organisation’s activities, has enabled hoaxers to establish their bogus stories and inadvertently bolster popular romantic notions about SOE’s work. Just as genuine agents had to learn to pass as civilians in Nazi-occupied countries, fake agents have produced convincing and often sophisticated narratives that have fooled the public, infiltrating books, television and more recently social media. Several cases of imposture are highlighted, along with examples of memoirs and testimonies of verifiable SOE agents whose accounts nevertheless raise questions about their accuracy and the blurred lines between truth and fabrication. Despite the publication of SOE official histories and the release of thousands of SOE’s files to the National Archives, fakers continue to flourish. This article calls for a greater recognition both of fakery and of the SOE agents and staff whose bona fide careers continue to remain overshadowed by their counterfeit counterparts.

This article discusses the activities of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Greece during World War II, re-evaluating the stormy relationship between SOE and the Foreign Office (FO) in the light of previously unused SOE records. Although standard accounts of SOE in Greece blame the Foreign Office for its inability to understand the situation and, indirectly, for the outbreak of the Civil War in December 1944, this article argues that both SOE and the Foreign Office were out of touch with what was happening in occupied Greece. It also argues that between September 1942 and the Spring of 1943, SOE intentionally acted behind the back of the Foreign Office, deeply entangling itself in the Greek resistance movement without any real awareness of the political situation in the country. For intelligence studies, this story provides a unique insight into the British approach to the political complexities of occupied Europe during World War II.

This article explores the relationship between the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the Italian campaign during World War II. Drawing on recently declassified records, the article analyzes three issues that prevented satisfactory coordination between the two agencies and the impact those issues had on the effectiveness of the Allied military support given to the partisan movements: (1) the U.S. government's determination to maintain the independence of its agencies; (2) the inability of the Armed Forces Headquarters to impose its will on the reluctant subordinate levels of command; and (3) the relatively low priority given to the Italian resistance at the beginning of the campaign. The article contributes to recent studies on OSS and SOE liaisons and sheds additional light on an important turning point in the history of their relations.

1. Introduction: Politics and Strategy in the Clandestine War - new perspectives in the study of S.O.E. Neville Wylie 2. 'Of Historical Interest Only': The origins and vicissitudes of the SOE Archive Duncan Stuart 3. A glass half full - Some thoughts on the evolution of the study of the Special Operations Executive Mark Seaman 4. The 'Massingham' Mission and the Secret 'Special relationship': Cooperation and rivalry between the Anglo-American clandestine services in French North Africa, November 1942 - May 1943 T. C. Wales 5. Communist in SOE: Explaining James Klugmann's recruitment and retention Roderick Bailey 6. 'Kipling and all that': American perceptions of SOE and British imperial intrigue in the Balkans, 1943-1945 Matthew Jones 7. Ungentlemanly warriors or unreliable diplomats? Special Operations Executive and 'irregular political activities Neville Wylie 8. A succession of crises: SOE in the Middle East, 1940-1945 Saul Kelly 9. 'Toughs and Thugs': The Mazzini Society and Political Warfare against Italian POWs in India, 1941-1943 Kent Fedorowich 10. 'Against the Grain': Special Operations Executive in Spain, 1941-1945 David Messenger 11. Special Operations Executive's Foreign Currency Transactions Christopher J. Murphy Index

Any detailed comparative analysis of the activities in Greece of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and of its American counterpart, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), during the Second World War would be a formidable undertaking.4 For the manifold activities of both organizations engendered massive archives. In the case of OSS this has for some years progressively been made open to researchers in the National Archives and Records Service in Washington, while the records of SOE are in the process of being released to the Public Record Office in London.5 The OSS archive is indeed a treasure trove, albeit one that it is not easy to find one’s way around, for the organization’s appetite for information was, fortunately, insatiable. It was voracious enough, indeed, to embrace the acquisition of restaurant menus from Thessaloniki in early 1944, which demonstrate that food was available in abundance to anyone in a position to pay the astronomical prices, and of copies of Aetopoula, the magazine for children published by EAM, the National Liberation Front. Although very rich in terms of content, the OSS papers are not well ordered. The records of SOE, by contrast, are better organized and indexed, although not as catholic in terms of content. The very bulk (by the early 1990s some 4000 cubic feet of OSS records had been opened to researchers) of the OSS material presents problems to the would-be researcher. One scholar, Robert Brewer, has written with feeling that ‘the mass and weight of the OSS documentation can overwhelm anyone contemplating a frontal assault on its secrets’.6 Another, Robin Winks, whose Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 is a compelling study of the interface between the intrigue-prone worlds of the academy and intelligence, wrote in the mid-1980s of the OSS archive as a ‘veritable mudslide that moves forward steadily each year’ and of ‘a controlled avalanche of materials’.7

The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was created in July 1940, bringing together three existing bodies that had been developed to deal with covert operations: Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6); MI (R), a research unit at the War Office; and Electra House, a propaganda unit within the Foreign Office. Under the Minister of Economic Warfare (initially Dr. Hugh Dalton, later Lord Selborne), SOE's role was to encourage and develop resistance movements throughout Axis‐occupied Europe, both to prepare to support eventual Allied landings and, in the meantime, to carry out specific, targeted acts of sabotage that would hinder the Axis war effort. SOE's reach also extended beyond Europe, with a mission in Algiers and regional headquarters in Cairo and New Delhi (where SOE was known as Force 136). SOE was divided into geographical “country” sections that took responsibility for operations in a given area. These were supported by a number of ancillary sections that dealt with such matters as false documents and special devices.

There is good reason for coupling the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the Inter-Services Liaison Department (ISLD) under the same rubric in this book, for the work of the two services in Persia was inextricably intertwined and their identity possibly even coalescent, in the sense that ISLD appears to have used SOE in the region as a convenient proxy. What better cover can there be for a secret service than another secret service? Much of the discourse in Nazi Secret Warfare addressed issues of dysfunction in the German secret services, including problems arising from interservice rivalry. Whilst it has to be acknowledged that the British response to German threat in Persia was overwhelmingly concerted and effective, it is only fair to recognize that the British services in the region were themselves not immune to a certain degree of interservice rivalry and friction.2 However, such instances were rare and were generally resolved in a timely fashion, so that no conflict was permitted to escalate to a point where it might actually impede operations. For instance, the relationship that existed between British counterintelligence and security intelligence in Persia, as represented by Joe Spencer’s DSO Persia organization, and the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), thinly disguised in Asia as ISLD, was not a happy one.