Honey Trapped by Henry R. Schlesinger

Author:Henry R. Schlesinger [Schlesinger, Henry R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2022-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

WITH THE CREATION OF the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the summer of 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sought to consolidate specialized elements of Britain’s warfare and intelligence capabilities, including sabotage, reconnaissance, and espionage, into an elite force. The hybrid program initially fell under the control of Hugh Dalton, the minister of economic warfare. His diary entry for Monday, July 22, 1940, drily notes among the most famous of Churchill’s wartime quotes: “The War Cabinet agreed this morning to my new duties. ‘And now,’ said the PM, ‘go set Europe ablaze.’”

Adopting unconventional tactics, the group soon became known as the Baker Street Irregulars after its headquarters’ famous address and Sherlock Holmes’s fictional intelligence network of street urchins. However, another appellation that soon attached to the organization, Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, was perhaps more accurate. In fact, the SOE was a merger of components from three existing organizations—the MI(R), a research branch of the War Office; Section D (sabotage) of MI6; and Department EH (Electra House), a propaganda organization embedded in the Foreign Service.

Drawing from talent outside the military—Civvy Street—the SOE worked closely with other intelligence organizations, including America’s new spy agency, Office of Strategic Services (OSS), as well as partisan fighters in occupied territories. One such group of SOE-trained partisans carried out the 1942 ambush of SS officer Reinhard Heydrich, the primary architect of the Holocaust, in an operation codenamed Anthropoid just outside of Prague. Another group conducted a series of raids with Norwegian resistance fighters targeting the Reich’s heavy water program, crippling its nuclear weapons development effort. An even bolder plan hatched by the SOE in 1944, codenamed Foxley, targeted Hitler for assassination. However, it was decided the dictator’s incompetence was thought to be an asset to the Allies’ war effort.

With SOE among the closely held secrets of the war, robust counter-intelligence and security would prove an essential component to keep it secret. In order to protect against honey traps, the SOE enlisted Marie Christine Chilver. The daughter of a British journalist, the Latvian correspondent for The Times of London, and a Latvian mother, she was born in Riga in 1920. A student in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne, when France fell to Germany in 1940, Chilver was arrested and interned. She escaped from the garrison prison at Besançon, then nursed back to health a downed British flyer, RAF Flight Lieutenant Simpson, in the unoccupied zone of Lyon before the pair escaped to England in 1942. Her natural clandestine talents, on full display for Simpson during their flight back to England along with unsubstantiated gossip raised his suspicions. A report later noted that he described her with a too “well-kept appearance” for having just escaped an internment camp along with his assessment of her as an expert liar and extremely intelligent.

In offering up his suspicions about the young woman, Simpson could hardly have written a better letter of reference. If not already employed by the Germans, she was just the type SOE needed. Following a full security check,

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