Its agents were mainly tasked with sabotage and. Vera Leigh, a British agent, worked on underground escape lines run by the French Resistance to aid Allied servicemen trying to get out of France. In June 1940, a new volunteer force - the Special Operations Executive (SOE) - was set up to wage a secret war.
One such camp in the wilds of Scotland became particularly notable. Through an examination of case studies of individual wives of intelligence operatives, constructed on the basis of information gathered from scattered primary and secondary sources, it is possible to assemble and analyse a wide, highly differentiated range of gender relationships at the intersection of the manifest and secret worlds. Christine Skarbek, known as Christine Granville, a Jewish woman from Poland, helped British servicemen escape from German prisoner of war camps. In World War Two, a network of British secret schools trained agents to fight the Nazis. It is therefore surely appropriate to conduct an examination of the hitherto neglected social phenomenon of female agency in the “spyscape” of wartime British and German covert operations. Intelligence historians currently find themselves at a turning point, where new approaches to the writing of intelligence history have been called for that transcend the study of operations and policy, while drawing when necessary upon the methodologies of such adjacent disciplines as social history and historical geoinformatics.
Few existing archival records or secondary sources appear to narrate or describe the circumstances, relationships, and activities of “spy wives” during the Second World War. Frieswyk, now 97, was the C.I.A.’s first female intelligence cartographer and is the last surviving member of the original O.S.S.
0 kommentar(er)
