Espionage Archives - The History Press

SIGINT

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 04:01:36 +0000

Signals Intelligence, or SIGINT, is the interception and evaluation of coded enemy messages. From Enigma to Ultra, Purple to Lorenz, Room 40 to Bletchley, SIGINT has been instrumental in both victory and defeat during the First and Second World War. In the First World War, a vast network of signals rapidly expanded across the globe, spawning a new breed of spies and intelligence operatives to code, de-code and analyse thousands of messages. As a result, signallers and cryptographers in the Admiralty’s famous Room 40 paved the way for the code breakers of Bletchley Park in the Second World War. In the ensuing war years the world battled against a web of signals intelligence that gave birth to Enigma and Ultra, and saw agents from Britain, France, Germany, Russia, America and Japan race to outwit each other through infinitely complex codes. For the first time, Peter Matthews reveals the secret history of global signals intelligence during the world wars through original interviews with German interceptors, British code breakers, and US and Russian cryptographers.

“SIGINT is a fascinating account of what Allied investigators learned postwar about the Nazi equivalent of Bletchley Park. Turns out, 60,000 crptographers, analysts and linguists achieved considerable success in solving intercepted traffic, and even broke the Swiss Enigma! Based on recently declassifed NSA document, this is a great contribution to the literature.” – The St Ermin’s Hotel Intelligence Book of the Year Award 2014

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BRIXMIS

Simon Appleby — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 18:53:23 +0000

BRIXMIS (British Commander-in-Chief’s Mission to the Group Soviet Forces of Occupation in Germany) is one of the most covert elite units of the British Army. They were dropped in behind ‘enemy lines’ ten months after the Second World War had ended and continued with their intelligence-gathering missions until the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. During this period Berlin was a hotbed of spying between East and West. BRIXMIS was established as a trusted channel of communication between the Red Army and the British Army on the Rhine. However, they acted in the shadows to steal advanced Soviet equipment and penetrate top-secret training areas. Here Steve Gibson offers a new understanding of the complex British role in the Cold War.

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Lorenz

Simon Appleby — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 18:54:54 +0000

The breaking of the Enigma machine is one of the most heroic stories of the Second World War. But there was another German cipher machine, used by Hitler himself to convey messages to his top generals in the field. A machine more complex and secure than Enigma. A machine that could never be broken. For sixty years, no one knew about about Lorenz or ‘Tunny’, or the determined group of men who finally broke the code and thus changed the course of the war. Many of them went to their deaths without anyone knowing of their achievements. Here, for the first time, codebreaker. Captain Jerry Roberts tells the complete story of this extraordinary feat of intellect and of his struggle to get his wartime colleagues the recognition they deserve. The work they carried out at Bletchley Park was groundbreaking and is recognised as having kick-started the modern computer age.

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Lorenz

Simon Appleby — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 18:54:54 +0000

The breaking of the Enigma machine is one of the most heroic stories of the Second World War and highlights the crucial work of the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, which prevented Britain’s certain defeat in 1941. But there was another German cipher machine, used by Hitler himself to convey messages to his top generals in the field. A machine more complex and secure than Enigma. A machine that could never be broken. For sixty years, no one knew about Lorenz or ‘Tunny’, or the determined group of men who finally broke the code and thus changed the course of the war. Many of them went to their deaths without anyone knowing of their achievements. Here, for the first time, senior codebreaker Captain Jerry Roberts tells the complete story of this extraordinary feat of intellect and of his struggle to get his wartime colleagues the recognition they deserve. The work carried out at Bletchley Park during the war to partially automate the process of breaking Lorenz, which had previously been done entirely by hand, was groundbreaking and is recognised as having kick-started the modern computer age.

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Violette

Simon Appleby — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 19:08:18 +0000

SOE agent Violette Szabó was one of the most incredible women who operated behind enemy lines during the Second World War. The daughter of an English father and French mother, and widow of a French army officer, she was daring and courageous, conducting sabotage missions, being embroiled in gun battles and battling betrayal. On her second mission she was captured by the Nazis, interrogated and tortured, then deported to Germany where she was eventually executed at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Violette was one of the first women ever to be awarded the George Cross, and her fascinating life has been immortalised in film and on the page. Written by her daughter, Violette (formerly Young, Brave and Beautiful) reveals the woman and mother behind this extraordinary hero.

SOE agent Violette Szabó was one of the most incredible women who operated behind enemy lines during the Second World War. The daughter of an English father and French mother, and widow of a French army officer, she was daring and courageous, conducting sabotage missions, being embroiled in gun battles and battling betrayal. On her second mission she was captured by the Nazis, interrogated and tortured, then deported to Germany where she was eventually executed at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Violette was one of the first women ever to be awarded the George Cross, and her fascinating life has been immortalised in film and on the page. Written by her daughter, Young, Brave and Beautiful reveals the woman and mother behind this extraordinary hero.

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Moscow Rules

Simon Appleby — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 18:28:24 +0000

After the guns fell silent in May 1945, the USSR resumed its clandestine warfare against the western democracies. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin installed secret police services in all the satellite countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Trained by his NKVD – a predecessor of the KGB – officers of the Polish UB, the Czech StB, the Hungarian AVO, Romania’s Securitate, Bulgaria’s KDS, Albania’s Sigurimi and the Stasi of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) spied on and ruthlessly repressed their fellow citizens on the Soviet model. When the resultant hatred exploded in uprisings – in GDR 1953, Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968 – they were put down by brutality, bloodshed and Soviet tanks. What was at first not so obvious was that these state terror organisations were also designed for military and commercial espionage in the West, to conceal the real case officers in Moscow. Specially trained operatives undertook mokrye dyela or ‘wet jobs’, including assassination of émigrés and other anti-Soviet figures. Perhaps the most menacing were the sleepers who settled in the West, married and had children while waiting to strike against their host countries. Many of them are still among us. Here, historian and author Douglas Boyd explores for the first time the relationship between the KGB and its ghastly brood of ‘daughters’ – a true family from hell.

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PROSPER

Simon Appleby — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 19:06:29 +0000

In May 1940 Francis Suttill was commissioned into the East Surrey regiment of the British Army. He was later recruited by the SOE, and after being trained during the summer of 1942, Suttill was chosen to create a new resistance network in northern France, based in Paris, with the operational name Physician. His code name was Prosper and his assumed identity was François Desprées. The circuit of agents grew fast until June 1943, when the Gestapo discovered letters, instructions, crystal sets and addresses in a car and false ID papers in an apartment. Over the next three months, more then eighty agents died or were killed, mostly in concentration camps. Major Suttill DSO would be killed in Sachsenhausen in May 1945. Rumours of betrayal by MI6, even of the involvement of Winston Churchill, have abounded ever since. For the first time, Major Suttill’s son tells the whole story of the tragedy basing his meticulous research on primary sources.

In June 1943, SOE’s Prosper resistance circuit in France led by Major Francis Suttill collapsed very suddenly. Was it deliberately betrayed by the British as part of a deception plan to make the Germans think an invasion was imminent? Was it betrayed by MI6 out of jealousy? Did Churchill meet Prosper and deliberately mislead him? These are some of the stories that have developed since the war as survivors and others struggled to explain the sudden collapse of this circuit, the biggest in France at the time. Shadows in the Fog by Major Suttill’s son meticulously traces what actually happened. It provides one of the most detailed records of the organisation and work of a resistance circuit ever published. The story that emerges shows the enormous risks faced by those who resisted and what their bravery enabled them to achieve.

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Between Silk and Cyanide

Simon Appleby — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 18:03:36 +0000

In 1942, with a black-market chicken under his arm, Leo Marks left his father’s famous bookshop, 84 Charing Cross Road, and went to war. He was twenty-two and a cryptopgraher of genius. In Between Silk and Cyanide, his critically acclaimed account of his time in SOE, Marks tells how he revolutionised the code-making techniques of the Allies, trained some of the most famous agents dropped into France including Violette Szabo and ‘the White Rabbit’, and why he wrote haunting verse including his ‘The Life that I have’ poem. He reveals for the first time the disastrous dimensions of the code war between SOE and the Germans in Holland; how the Germans were fooled into thinking a Secret Army was operating in the Fatherland itself, and how and why he broke General de Gaulle’s secret code. Both thrilling and poignant, Marks’s book is truly one of the last great Second World War memoirs.

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Odette

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 04:01:07 +0000

Odette Brailly entered the nation’s consciousness in the 1950s when her remarkable – and romantic – exploits as an SOE agent first came to light. She had been the first woman to be awarded the GC, as well as the Legion d’Honneur, and in 1950 the release of a film about her life made her the darling of the British popular press. But others openly questioned Odette’s personal and professional integrity, even claiming that she had a clandestine affair with her supervisor Capt. Peter Churchill, with whom she had worked undercover in France. Soon she became as controversial as she was celebrated. In the first full biography of this incredible woman for nearly sixty years, historian Penny Starn delves into recently opened SOE personnel files to reveal the true story of this wartime heroine and the officer who posed as her husband. From her life as a French housewife living in Britain and her work undercover with the French Resistance, to her arrest, torture and unlikely survival in Ravensbruck concentration camp, Starns reveals for the first time the truth of Odette’s mission and the heart-breaking identity of her real betrayer.

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