Intell
MOON SQUADRONS
SOE Drop by Ivan Berryman. Halifax B.II Series 1 (Special) JP254 of 148 Special Duties Squadron, RAF is depicted over the drop zone near to the Alt Aussee salt mine in the Austrian Alps as two of the four SOE agents exit the bomber via the crew access door. Their mission was to secure and protect 6,755 items of the…
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ULTRA ENIGMA
Dolphin was broken throughout the war but the cipher was not used by U-boats after Oct 5, 1941. The British politician the 2nd Viscount Hailsham once said that ‘The one case in which I think I can see the finger of God in contemporary history is Churchill’s arrival at the…
Strategic Intelligence I
US Army – Cavalry Scout ‘No war can be conducted successfully without early and good intelligence’, wrote the great Duke of Marlborough. George Washington agreed: ‘The necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent and need not be further argued.’ No sensible soldier or sailor or airman does argue. From the…
Strategic Intelligence II
The charge of the Bayreuth Dragoons at the Battle of Hohenfriedberg. Real-time intelligence, except over very short distances, was inherently difficult to acquire in the medieval world. It simply could not be carried quickly enough ahead of the movement of enemy forces. That would remain so for centuries to come.…
Codename “Tate”
Wulf Dietrich Christian Schmidt, later known as Harry Williamson (7 December 1911 – 19 October 1992) was a Danish citizen who during World War II became a double agent working for Britain against Nazi Germany under the codename Tate. He was part of the Double Cross System, under which all…
Richard S. Leghorn and the Birth of Cold War Reconnaissance
The first to articulate a vision of how the intelligence demands of this new postwar era might be met was Richard S. Leghorn. He had graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1939 with a degree in physics and a reserve commission as an army second lieutenant. In…
WARNINGS
Leopold Trepper The Soviet border guards were captured semi clothed as they stumbled half-awake out of their barracks. The German Army Propagandakompanien (PR) photographers caught the dazed look on their shocked faces as they stood with hands raised in the watery spring dawn. They were the victims of Stalin’s willful…