App Store

Google Play

Details page - Device banner - 894x1036

היכנס לעולם אינסופי של סיפורים

תקשיב ותקרא

Tania Szabó

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.

The History Press

Espionage

Violette: The Missions of SOE Agent Violette Szabó GC

Douglas Boyd

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.

Moscow Rules: Secret Police, Spies, Sleepers, Assassins

Francis J. Suttill

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.

PROSPER: Major Suttill's French Resistance Network

Leo Marks

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.

Between Silk and Cyanide: A Code Maker's War 1941-45

Steve Gibson

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.