Podcasts about Special Operations Executive

On lui a décerné la Distinguished Service Cross, l'une des plus hautes distinctions américaines. La France l'a honorée de la Croix de guerre et l'a faite chevalier de la Légion d'honneur. Parfaite incarnation de la résilience, Virginia Hall, alias “La dame qui boîte” pour les nazis, a défié la Gestapo en France, dirigé un réseau de résistance de 1 500 personnes, organisé des parachutages d'armes, fait sauter des voies ferrées, libéré des prisonniers, et traversé les Pyrénées en pleine hiver… tout cela avec une jambe de bois. Et pourtant, comme beaucoup d'autres figures féminines, l'Histoire semble l'avoir oubliée.Nous sommes le 23 août 1941. Virginia Hall, nom de code 3844, fait ses premiers pas sur le sol français en tant qu'agente du Special Operations Executive. Mais pas question de la jeter tête baissée au coeur de la fournaise. Avant d'entrer en zone occupée, elle doit assurer sa couverture. On l'envoie à Vichy, en zone libre, où elle joue le rôle d'une journaliste, correspondante pour le New York Post. Elle se façonne une silhouette soignée, élégante, sûre d'elle, et rencontre ainsi aisément ses contacts, loin des oreilles indiscrètes.

[SPONSORISÉ] Voici l'histoire de Nancy Wake, surnommée la Souris Blanche, journaliste australienne engagée dans la Résistance française pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, et résistante la plus décorée du conflit. D'abord active dans le réseau Pat O'Leary, elle sera bientôt recrutée par le Special Operations Executive.

Voici l'histoire de Nancy Wake, surnommée la Souris Blanche, journaliste australienne engagée dans la Résistance française pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, et résistante la plus décorée du conflit. D'abord active dans le réseau Pat O'Leary, elle sera bientôt recrutée par le Special Operations Executive.

Voici l'histoire de Nancy Wake, surnommée la Souris Blanche, journaliste australienne engagée dans la Résistance française pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, et résistante la plus décorée du conflit. D'abord active dans le réseau Pat O'Leary, elle sera bientôt recrutée par le Special Operations Executive.Nous sommes en novembre 1942. En seulement 3 jours, la zone libre connaît de grands bouleversements. Le 8 novembre, les forces alliées lancent l'opération Torch en débarquant en Algérie, au Maroc et en Tunisie dans le but d'ouvrir un nouveau front et d'affaiblir les forces de l'Axe. Malgré une résistance acharnée, les Alliés prennent rapidement le contrôle de plusieurs villes, coupant ainsi les voies d'approvisionnement et affaiblissant l'armée allemande. Mais Hitler ne compte pas en rester là. Dès le 11 novembre, il ordonne l'invasion de la zone libre en France.

Voici l'histoire de Nancy Wake, surnommée la Souris Blanche, journaliste australienne engagée dans la Résistance française pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, et résistante la plus décorée du conflit. D'abord active dans le réseau Pat O'Leary, elle sera bientôt recrutée par le Special Operations Executive.1997. Une femme agée entre dans l'un de ces magasins de prêts sur gages que l'ont trouve en trouve en masse plein à Sydney. En voyant passer cette dame de 85 ans, cheveux blancs, ongles vernis, regard fier et dos tout juste voûté, aucun témoin de la scène ne peut s'imaginer ce qu'elle s'apprête à déposer. Sur le comptoir, elle sort de son sac alourdi une impressionnante série de médailles militaires, en or et en argent. Parmi elles, la Médaille du Courage, la Médaille de la Résistance et trois authentiques Croix de Guerre. Ces objets, d'une valeur inestimable, ont bien moins d'importance que ses actes passés...

Have you heard of the White Mouse? Given the codename by the Gestpao in WW2, for her ability to evade capture and wreak havoc behind enemy lines, Nancy Wake was a larger-than-life character, and highly decorated Special Operations Operator. At one time, she topped the Nazi's most wanted list. She was one of dozens of women who served in the Special Operations Executive during WW2, with distinction. Why were we so open about women in Special Operations nearly 100 years ago, but now we are so closed minded, at least it would seem? To answer this question, Harry Moffitt is joined by Frank Steder, the Principle Scientist at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and one of the researchers who was originally involved in Norwegian Jergertroppen, or Hunter Troop: an all-female special operations unit. Frank himself served with the Norwegian Armed Forces and since that time has been enlisted back to work in its science and technology branch and as a visiting scientist to the Norwegian Naval Postgraduate School. Today we talk about women in the special forces, conscription, and big institutional change.

This week, Kate talks about a new display being created for the Haliburton Highlands Museum. It's all about winter sports, particularly curling that started in the early 1940's. Plus, Paul has the story of Frank Pickersgill and Ken Macalister - 2 young regular Canadians who found themselves teamed up and trained as SOE (Britain's Special Operations Executive) agents. The pair were parachuted into France to work with the Resistance, but were betrayed with tragic results. Unlikely Soldiers: How Two Canadians Fought the Secret War Against Nazi Occupation, by Johnathan Vance (HarperCollins, 2008) Kate Butler is the Director of the Haliburton Highlands Museum. Paul Vorvis is the host of the Your Haliburton Morning Show 7 - 9 a.m. Fridays on Canoe FM 100.9 and streaming on your devices. Haliburton County is in cottage country about 2 1/2 hours north of Toronto. You can contact us at timewarp@canoefm.com

NAZI scientists relied on heavy water to produce the right uranium isotope for an atomic weapon.  They produced most of their heavy water at a hydroelectric in occupied Norway called Vemork.  In February 1943, a small group of Norwegian commandos slipped into Vemork, blew it up, and made their escape.  This is after months of reconnaissance and preparation in the frozen wilderness.  Neal Bascomb tells the story in “The Winter Fortress.”  

The Front to the Films podcast is thrilled to announce our latest episode featuring a conversation with Georges Strachan-Heyes, retired British Army officer and Director of Operations for the UK and NATO at Onebrief. In this episode, hosted by Colonel Tom Rendall (USA, Ret.), Georges brings his exceptional insights in discussing The World War II Foundation's newest documentary, Dad's Secret War: France 1944. This gripping documentary, based on Scholars of Mayhem by Daniel C. Guiet and Timothy K. Smith, chronicles the daring World War II missions of Jean Claude Guiet, who served with Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) and America's Office of Strategic Services (OSS). His covert operations helped arm and organize the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied France following D-Day, ultimately shaping the Allied breakthrough in Europe. Jean Claude's “Salesman II” circuit team played a vital role in holding back German reinforcements from Normandy, a critical part of the Allied advance. As Georges recounts, Guiet's story adds a powerful chapter to the narrative of WWII, bringing to light the real risks and sacrifices made by the unsung agents operating behind enemy lines. On September 10, 2024, the Foundation held a special advance screening of Dad's Secret War at Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg). It was a memorable evening attended by 150 senior active and retired members of the Special Operations and Airborne communities, along with their families. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with attendees deeply moved by this untold story of heroism and resilience. Georges Strachan-Heyes, who served as the keynote speaker, delivered exceptional remarks that resonated with the entire audience. His speech, which was so captivating and insightful that it left the room spellbound, delved into the film's themes and explored how covert actions by the OSS and SOE transformed the course of WWII. His remarks were so impactful that we immediately invited him to share more on Front to the Films. In this podcast episode, airing as a lead-up to the formal premiere of Dad's Secret War at the French Embassy in Washington, DC, on November 14, Georges joins Colonel Rendall to discuss the importance of bringing this story to the screen. He touches on themes of resilience, sacrifice, and the meticulous training and bravery required of SOE agents. Georges also reflects on the documentary's production, which involved collaboration with the Newhouse School, offering students a hands-on opportunity to explore WWII history and contribute to historical storytelling as part of The World War II Foundation's Doccumentary, Film, Photography and History Program. Their involvement reinforces the film's dual purpose: honoring the sacrifices of WWII veterans while educating future generations on the critical lessons of the past. Following its Embassy premiere, Dad's Secret War: France 1944 will be aired nationwide on nearly 300 American Public Television channels. The film, narrated by Kevin Bacon, invites viewers into the life of Jean Claude Guiet and his comrades, revealing the profound human and historical impact of their missions in occupied France. Georges and Colonel Rendall's conversation serves as an enlightening primer for the documentary, giving listeners a rare perspective on the bravery and complexities of war, and how these untold stories resonate in today's world. Join us for this extraordinary episode of Front to the Films, where we honor those who lived and served in the shadows, and look forward to the story's reach on a national scale. This conversation is both an introduction to the documentary as well as a fitting tribute to the courage that defined the Greatest Generation.

Le Special Operations Executive (SOE) manual était un guide pratique destiné aux agents du Special Operations Executive, une organisation britannique secrète créée en 1940 pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale pour mener des opérations de sabotage et de résistance derrière les lignes ennemies, principalement dans les territoires occupés par l'Allemagne nazie. Contexte du SOE Le SOE avait pour mission de soutenir et coordonner les mouvements de résistance dans les pays occupés, de déstabiliser les forces de l'Axe et d'affaiblir leur capacité militaire. Ses agents étaient formés pour infiltrer les territoires ennemis, organiser des réseaux de résistance, mener des actes de sabotage (comme la destruction d'infrastructures stratégiques) et collecter des renseignements. Le SOE a souvent été appelé "Churchill's secret army" (l'armée secrète de Churchill), en raison du rôle décisif de Winston Churchill dans sa création. Objectifs du manuel Le SOE manual était conçu pour fournir aux agents des instructions détaillées sur un large éventail de compétences nécessaires à leurs missions, dans un environnement dangereux où ils devaient souvent opérer seuls ou en petites équipes. Les domaines abordés incluaient : 1. Techniques de sabotage : Le manuel expliquait comment détruire des installations industrielles, des ponts, des voies ferrées, et des véhicules avec des explosifs de fortune ou des moyens discrets. 2. Espionnage et collecte de renseignements : Les agents apprenaient comment infiltrer des réseaux ennemis, recueillir des informations sensibles et envoyer des rapports aux alliés, souvent en utilisant des méthodes cryptographiques ou des messages codés. 3. Dissimulation et infiltration : Une partie cruciale du manuel portait sur la manière de se fondre dans la population locale et d'éviter la capture. Cela impliquait l'adoption de nouvelles identités, l'utilisation de déguisements, et l'apprentissage des coutumes et langues locales. 4. Techniques de combat et d'autodéfense : Les agents recevaient une formation sur des méthodes de combat rapproché, comme l'utilisation d'armes improvisées, le maniement de couteaux, et le combat à mains nues. L'accent était mis sur l'efficacité et la discrétion, dans le but de neutraliser l'ennemi rapidement et silencieusement. 5. Survie en territoire ennemi : Le manuel contenait des conseils sur la survie en milieu hostile, y compris l'approvisionnement en nourriture, l'évasion des forces ennemies, et la recherche de refuges sûrs. Importance du manuel Le SOE manual représentait un condensé de l'expertise opérationnelle accumulée par le SOE, formant les agents à être à la fois indépendants et polyvalents, capables d'agir dans des environnements où la moindre erreur pouvait leur coûter la vie. Le manuel insistait sur la flexibilité, l'ingéniosité et l'adaptabilité des agents dans des situations imprévisibles. Ce document était hautement confidentiel pendant la guerre et n'était divulgué qu'aux agents en formation, avec des mesures de sécurité strictes pour éviter qu'il ne tombe entre les mains ennemies. De nombreuses techniques et pratiques couvertes dans le manuel ont influencé les opérations spéciales et les tactiques d'espionnage bien après la guerre. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

In this episode, we take a look at some of the tactics and origins of the Special Operations Executive, an organisation that helped win WWII. WARNING: This episode of The Raven's Grove features the following Triggers: War mentions Fascism mentions War Crimes mentions, including genocide mentions Blood and Gore mentions Death mentions Firearm mentions Explosive mentions Knife mentions Espionage mentions Assassination mentions and Suicide mentions So, if any of those are in any way an issue for you, PLEASE GIVE THIS EPISODE A MISS.

The Special Operations Executive was a secretive British organisation that engaged in espionage and supported resistance movements in occupied Europe during the Second World War. In this episode Mat is joined by historian Clare Mulley to tell the story of several women who played vital roles in SOE operations - many of whom lost their lives in the effort.Clare Mulley's latest book, Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka, is available now. Find out more about Clare at https://claremulley.comPresenter: Mat McLachlanGuest: Clare MulleyProducer: Jess StebnickiSubscribe via Patreon for exclusive bonus episodes, early access to all episodes, ad-free listening and special online events with Mat McLachlan! https://www.patreon.com/MMHistoryJoin one of our battlefield tours and walk in the footsteps of the Anzacs! Visit https://battlefields.com.au/ for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Churchill declared that Britain would resist the advance of the German army--alone if necessary. Churchill commanded the Special Operations Executive to secretly develop of a very special kind of military unit that would operate on their own initiative deep behind enemy lines. The units would be licensed to kill, fully deniable by the British government, and a ruthless force to meet the advancing Germans.The very first of these "butcher-and-bolt" units--the innocuously named Maid Honour Force--was led by Gus March-Phillipps, a wild British eccentric of high birth, and an aristocratic, handsome, and bloodthirsty young Danish warrior, Anders Lassen. Amped up on amphetamines, these assorted renegades and sociopaths undertook the very first of Churchill's special operations--a top-secret, high-stakes mission to seize Nazi shipping in the far-distant port of Fernando Po, in West Africa.Though few of these early desperadoes survived WWII, they took part in a series of fascinating, daring missions that changed the course of the war. It was the first stirrings of the modern special-ops team, and all of the men involved would be declared war heroes when it was all over.To discuss this unit, dubbed by Churchill “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is today's guest, Damien Lewis, author of the book by the same name.

Noor Inayat Khan war eine Heldin des Widerstands gegen die Nazi-Besatzung im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Als Tochter des indischen Sufi-Predigers Hazrat Inayat Khan und der amerikanischen Mutter Ora Ray Baker, wuchs Noor in einem spirituell und künstlerisch geprägten Umfeld auf. Nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg zog die Familie nach London und später nach Paris, wo Noor eine friedliche Jugend verbrachte, Kinderpsychologie an der Sorbonne studierte und als Musikerin und Schriftstellerin tätig war. Mit dem Ausbruch des Zweiten Weltkriegs änderte sich ihr Leben dramatisch. Sie trat der Women's Auxiliary Air Force bei und wurde später von der Special Operations Executive als erste weibliche Funkerin in das besetzte Frankreich geschickt. Unter dem Decknamen "Madeleine" übermittelte sie wichtige Nachrichten über die Widerstandsbewegung nach London. Im Oktober 1943 wurde sie verraten, verhaftet und trotz brutaler Verhöre durch die Gestapo gab sie keine Informationen preis. Schließlich wurde sie in das Konzentrationslager Dachau deportiert und am 13. September 1944 hingerichtet. Noor Inayat Khan bleibt in Erinnerung als eine mutige Frau, die für Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit kämpfte und selbst in den dunkelsten Zeiten unerschütterlichen Mut bewies."Historische Heldinnen" lässt mithilfe von Künstlicher Intelligenz wichtige Frauen der Weltgeschichte auf ihr eigenes Leben zurückblicken. Selbstbewusst erzählen sie uns von ihrem Mut und ihrer Durchsetzungskraft.Viertausendhertz 2024 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ahead of the 80th anniversary of D-Day, journalist and author, Nahlah Ayed tells the story of two elite agents working for Britain's Special Operations Executive in France during the Second World War. "The War We Won Apart" is constructed from hours of unpublished interviews and archival and personal documents to recount the love story of a British woman, Sonia Butt and a French-Canadian soldier, Guy d'Artois who fought the war apart.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you want to hear the full version go to: https://www.patreon.com/posts/election-debates-105633791?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link At the end of the show a question from ian Currie Recommendations:  Eamonn Fiennes Return to the Wild - National Geographic Sir Ranulph Fiennes, ‘the greatest living explorer', and his cousin, actor Joseph Fiennes, revisit Ran's 1971 expedition of Canada's British Columbia. Catriona Night Train to Odesa by Jen Stout - BBC Radio 4 Eric - Netflix A desperate father, alongside a tenacious cop, battles his own demons on the streets of 1980s New York as he searches for his missing nine-year-old son. David S.O.E.: An outline history of the special operations executive 1940 - 46 - book SOE, the Special Operations Executive, was a small, tough British secret service, a dirty tricks department, set up in July 1940. Recruited from remarkably diverse callings, the men and women who were members of this most secret agency in the Second World War lived in great and constant danger. Their job was to support and stimulate resistance behind enemy lines; their credentials fortitude, courage, immense patience and a devotion to freedom. The activity of the SOE was world-wide. Abyssinian tribesmen, French farmers, exiled Russian grandees, coolies, smugglers, printers, policemen, telephonists, tycoons, prostitutes, rubber workers, railwaymen, peasants from the Pyranees to the Balkans, even the regent of Siam - all had a part to play as saboteurs, informers, partisans or secret agents. In this engrossing and illuminating study, the eminent Second World War historian, M.R.D. Foot, sheds light on the heroism of individual SOE agents across the world and provides us with the definitive account of the Executive's crucial wartime work.

In this episode of the History Rage Podcast, host Paul Bavill interviews Richard Duckett, author of "The Special Operations Executive in Burma." The discussion delves into the lesser-known aspects of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the Far East during World War II.Key Points:Diversity of Operations: Richard sheds light on SOE's operations in Burma, covering a diverse range of ethnic groups involved, including Chinese, Kachin, Karen, and more. The narrative dispels the misconception that all factions in Burma sided with the Japanese.Survival Stories: The conversation explores epic stories of survival by British prisoners of war (POWs) in Japanese camps. Richard highlights the brutalities faced by British agents, emphasizing the risks and challenges unique to the Far East theatre.Major Hugh Seagram: Richard recounts the heroic actions of Major Hugh Seagram, who surrendered to the Japanese to halt atrocities against the Karen people. The narrative extends to individuals like Saw Polar, a lieutenant with a remarkable escape and survival story.Operations Dilwin and Billet: Richard unveils significant SOE operations like Dilwin, a prolonged venture in Kachin territory, and Billet, focused on the Burma Independence Army. These operations contributed significantly to intelligence gathering and securing the Burmese resistance.Challenges in the Far East: The discussion explores the unique challenges faced by SOE in the Far East, including adapting to diverse ethnic groups, navigating the complex colonial context, and overcoming logistical hurdles in the vast and challenging environment.Collaboration with OSS: Richard shares insights into the collaboration between SOE and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), highlighting the forging of relationships that laid the foundation for future cooperation between British and American special forces.Resistance Movements: The episode touches upon the various resistance movements in Burma, encompassing Burmese nationalists, communists, and smaller ethnic groups. The complexities of these movements and their alliances are discussed in the context of the broader wartime narrative.Please subscribe to the History Rage Podcast on your favourite platform and consider supporting us on Patreon to get early access to episodes and exclusive perks. Join the conversation on TwitterYou can buy Richard's book “SOE in Burma” at Amazon and you can follow Richard on Twitter @richard_duckettYou can follow History Rage on Twitter @HistoryRage or Paul individually @PaulBavill and let us know what you wish people would just stop believing using the Hashtag #HistoryRage.You can join our 'Angry Mob' on Patreon as well. £5 per month gets you episodes 3 months early, the invite to choose questions, entry into our prize draws and the coveted History Rage mug. Subscribe at www.patreon.com/historyrage Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this week's episode of The Discourse, host Mike DeAngelo goes undercover to discuss “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” with star Cary Elwes (“The Princess Bride,” “Stranger Things,” “Saw”). The movie is based on real events and dives into the origin of the Special Operations Executive, a small group of highly skilled men recruited by the British military to strike German forces behind enemy lines. The high-energy action film is directed by Guy Ritchie (“The Gentleman,” “Snatch,” “Sherlock Holmes”) and also stars Henry Cavill, Henry Golding, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Eiza Gonzalez, and more. Elwes also discussed many of his other projects, past and present, including "Rebel Moon: Part Two," the "Knuckles" spin-off series from "Sonic The Hedgehog" and, of course, the classic "Princess Diaries" comedy. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theplaylist/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theplaylist/support

In this podcast episode, Dennis interviews Alex McDonald, a medical student and member of Tactical Medicine New Zealand, about the republishing of the book 'Guerilla Surgeon.' The book tells the story of Dr. Lindsay Rogers, a New Zealand-born surgeon who served with the Special Operations Executive in Yugoslavia during World War II. The conversation covers topics such as the challenges of providing medical care in resource-limited environments, building trust with local forces, and the importance of cultural competency. Alex also discusses the mission of Tactical Medicine New Zealand and their partnership with the Special Operations Medical Association (SOMA) to republish the book. Takeaways The book 'Guerilla Surgeon' tells the story of Dr. Lindsay Rogers, a New Zealand-born surgeon who served with the Special Operations Executive in Yugoslavia during World War II. Providing medical care in resource-limited environments requires improvisation and making the most of available resources. Building trust with local forces is crucial for successful medical operations in foreign nations. Cultural competency is important for effective communication and collaboration with partner forces. Tactical Medicine New Zealand aims to promote and advance tactical medicine in New Zealand and has partnered with SOMA to republish 'Guerilla Surgeon.' Thank you to Delta Development Team for in part, sponsoring this podcast. ⁠⁠⁠⁠deltadevteam.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more content go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠www.prolongedfieldcare.org ⁠⁠⁠⁠ Consider supporting us: ⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/ProlongedFieldCareCollective or www.lobocoffeeco.com/product-page/prolonged-field-care

For this "Quick Screen" episode, Michael checked out the brand new theatrical film "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare". What are some of his thoughts on this spy action comedy film based on a true story of Special Operations Executive in World War II starring Henry Cavill, Eiza González, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Babs Olusanmokun, Henry Golding, Cary Elwes? Check it out and see! Be a part of the conversation! E-mail the show at screennerdspodcast@gmail.com Follow the show on Twitter @screennerdspod Like the show on Facebook (Search for Screen Nerds Podcast and find the page there) Follow the show on Instagram and Threads just search screennerdspodcast Check out the show on Bluesky just search screennerdspodcast Be sure to check out the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Goodpods, Overcast, Amazon Music or your podcast catcher of choice! (and please share rate and review!) Want to be a guest or share your thoughts on the podcast? Send me an e-mail! Thanks to Frankie Creel for the artwork --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/screennerdspodcast/message

Volwest from Stati9n joins Bob "The Knife Junkie" DeMarco on Episode 496 of The Knife Junkie Podcast (https://theknifejunkie.com/496).Stati9n specializes in the development of unconventional tools and weapons for combatives and survival in austere environments and occupied zones.Inspired by the secret British WW2 organization S.O.E. ("Special Operations Executive"), whose purpose was to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in Axis-occupied Europe and Southeast Asia.Stati9n is also inspired by the weapons used by armies with limited resources during WW1, when butcher knives and other common household tools were modified for brutal trench warfare.Famous French knife maker and close combat specialist, Fred Perrin, collaborated with Stati9n in creating the Number Five Scorpion, a curved, double-edged self-protection knife designed around Perrin's signature forefinger retention hole.The company's offerings range from weapons for close quarters fighting to discreet but useful tools for minimalist urban and outback survival.Though knives are Stati9n's specialty, they also make other defensive tools, like a knuckle duster inspired by Austro-Hungarian knuckles from WW1; a non-metallic push dagger made of G10; and faux chopsticks, also made of G10, to give the owner something robust and stabby in non-permissive environments.Find Stati9n online at https://www.stati9n.com and on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/station_9_/Be sure to support The Knife Junkie and get in on the perks of being a patron, including early access to the podcast and exclusive bonus content. Visit https://www.theknifejunkie.com/patreon for details. You can also support The Knife Junkie channel with your next knife purchase. Find our affiliate links at https://theknifejunkie.com/knives.Let us know what you thought about this episode and leave a rating and/or a review. Your feedback is appreciated. You can also call the listener line at 724-466-4487 or email bob@theknifejunkie.com with any comments, feedback, or suggestions.To watch or listen to past episodes of the podcast, visit https://theknifejunkie.com/listen. And for professional podcast hosting, use The Knife Junkie's podcast platform of choice: https://theknifejunkie.com/podhost.

What would you need to go it alone behind enemy lines? For the agents of the notoriously brave Special Operations Executive in World War II, a select toolkit of spy gadgets represented the difference between life and death. Design Museum CEO Tim Marlow and host Alex Loxton discuss the groundbreaking folding motorcycle that accompanied SEO operatives on their thrilling missions into war torn Europe – and continues to influence engineering and design right up to the present day. From SPYSCAPE, the home of secrets. A Cup And Nuzzle production. Series produced by Alex Burnard, Morgan Childs, Claire Crofton, Joe Foley, Frank Palmer, Kellie Redmond and Isabel Sutton. Music by Nick Ryan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send us a Text Message.This week, I tell the inspiring stories of 6 women who served in the top secret British espionage and sabotage organization, the SOE, during World War II.  In the late 1930s, Hitler's Nazi Germany quickly expanded throughout Europe, grabbing up country after country in its quest for world domination. When France finally fell to the Nazis in 1940, Britain was utterly alone in Europe, a sitting duck. Something had to be done. That something was the SOE and they soon found that women, who were far less suspicious and conspicuous than men, made perfect undercover agents. Join me to learn how the women of the SOE sacrificed everything to literally save the world! Sources: Time Magazine "Inside the Stories of the Most Daring Women Spies of World War II"UK National Army Museum "Special Operations Executive"Imperial War Museums "SOE: The Secret British Organization of the Second World War"Historic UK "The Female Spies of the SOE"UK National Archives "Records of Special Operations Executive"UK National Army Museum "Defeat in the West, 1940"National Interest "Germany's Superpower Quest Caused World War I"The National WWII Museum "How Did Adolf Hitler Happen?"Aspects of History "The Women of SOE"Holocaust Encyclopedia "The British Policy of Appeasement Toward Hitler and Nazi Germany"pearlharbor.org "Why Didn't America Join the War Sooner?"International Churchhill Society "Famous Quotes and Stories"encyclopedia.com "Sansom, Odette"Australian War Memorial "Nancy Grace Augusta Wake"Support the show! Buy Me a CoffeeVenmo @Shea-LaFountaine

I feel like I should only need to post the purpose of the Special Operations Executive to sell you on this episode so here you go "Espionage, Sabotage, and Reconnaissance in German occupied Europe during WW2. But I'll also leave you  with what Churchill told the guy in charge of this "Ministry" when it was formed "Now go and set Europe ablaze."  Plus there's a great looking new movie coming out about these men and women (yeah, some of the greatest spies were women what of it) by Guy Ritchie.

In today's episode, I'm talking with Jenni L. Walsh. Her latest novel, Unsinkable, tells the story of Violet Jessop, a stewardess who survived the sinking of the Titanic as well as maritime disasters aboard Titanic's two sister ships! We talked about Jenni's desire to tell Violet's story along with her decision to write a dual timeline novel with a parallel story about another "unsinkable" woman. Jenni's loves sharing the stories of little-known women who've made remarkable contributions to history. Here's a description of Unsinkable: The Titanic was only the beginning. What she survived has become legend. Violet Jessop is Miss Unsinkable. After her mother becomes too ill to work, the responsibility to provide for the family falls to Violet as the oldest of nine. When the world enters the Great War, she serves as a nurse, helping men who could very well be her brothers. Working as a stewardess and wartime nurse, Violet not only survives a shipwreck but also two sinkings, one on the infamous Titanic. No one can understand why she would return to sea, but something keeps drawing Violet back to the tumultuous waters, where she struggles to put the tragedies of her past behind her and pursue a life and love all her own. Daphne has survived calamity of her own. Daphne Chaundanson grows up as an unwanted child after her mother died in a tragedy. She throws herself into education, collecting languages like candy in a desperate attempt to finally earn her father's approval. When the Special Operations Executive invites her to be an agent in France in World War II, her childhood of anonymity and her love of languages make her the perfect fit. She sees it as an opportunity to help the country she loves and live up to her father's expectations. But the dangers of war challenge Daphne in ways she never could have expected, and the secrets from her own past must be faced for her to truly have a future beyond the conflict—if she can survive it. ​ Inspired by true stories of Violet Jessop and the thirty-nine women of the Special Operations Executive. Two unsinkable women. Two stories of survival, family, and finding one's own happiness. One connection that reshapes both their lives forever. Purchase Unsinkable on Amazon (affiliate). Purchase Violet Jessop's memoir on Amazon (affiliate). Check out Jenni's website, and follow her on Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to my mailing list to receive book recommendations and samples of my writing! Join the Historical Fiction: Unpacked Podcast Group on Facebook! Be sure to visit my Instagram, Facebook, and website. Follow the show on Instagram! Purchase Alison's historical novel, One Traveler (affiliate). Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. If you click an affiliate link and make a purchase, you help support my work without paying any more for the product. Thank you for your support!

Welcome to The Best of Binge Reading 2023, Part One, the first of two shows featuring the most listened to episodes on our popular fiction podcast, chosen solely on the basis of the number of times you, our audience, listened to them. They include an intriguing range of genres, from a contemporary thriller, to a French story in equal parts about food and love, a World War II spy mystery, a NZ historical family saga pre-dating European settlement, and two romances, one a fresh and funny romcom, the other a tender second chance tale of loss, regret, and the influence family has on life changing decisions..... And like our audience, our authors reflect our international reach, with two Australians, a Kiwi, one French American, and one each from New York and Massachusetts. We present brief excerpts from each show, with links for where to find them if you'd like to hear more... As in previous years, we've selected shows that aired between Dec 1, 2022 and Dec 1, 2023. The second part of The Best Of The Joys of Binge Reading will air on January 16. Kelly Rimmer: Spies – Lies - Betrayal But now, here's the first of this week's guest authors, Kelly Rimmer.  Her sweeping World War II suspense has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide and made international best seller lists, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Her latest book, The Paris Agent, a fascinating dual timeline mystery with multiple romance lines moving from England and World War Two to the 1970s with the daughter of one of those people that was involved in the war. It's a powerful story of two otherwise ordinary women who become spies dropped into Nazi occupied France. I asked Kelly to tell us of the story's genesis. Kelly Rimmer - Best-selling World War II fiction Kelly Rimmer: My daughter's name is Violette. It's a family name from my husband's side. And when I was pregnant with her, and we were talking about names, you do the Googling thing, trying to think about famous people with this name. Or what the meaning of the name is. And I stumbled upon Violette Szabo, who was an SOE agent, in the F section of the SOE. Her story was so inspiring and had stuck with me. I loved the idea that we were naming my daughter after someone so incredible. And I had always intended, always hoped that I would come up with the right premise to write a book that was inspired by her. And, maybe two or three years ago, I heard a podcast about Diana Rowden, who is another SOE agent, who I had never heard of, even though I'd done a little bit of reading about the SOE. And I've also found her to be just such an incredible woman. The idea for this book came out of their stories, their real-life stories. It's fiction. I've taken a few liberties here and there with their stories. And they weren't actually close friends, but in my book, my characters inspired by them are friends. But for the most part, where I could, I followed the real history. Traitors operating within the SOE Jenny Wheeler: Part of its foundation is the understanding that's emerged since the war that the Special Operations Executive, the branch of the British Secret Service that handled all of the dispensing of agents over France. The ones that were so tremendously brave as to jump out of planes into enemy territory and work to support the Resistance... Some of those people were betrayed from within the SOE even before they set foot on French soil. Kelly Rimmer: There's plenty of scenarios where agents landed and were met by Nazi troops on the ground as they were landing. In hindsight, it's very clear that there were people in the SOE who were betraying information through to the Nazis, but at the time they were operating blind in so many ways. As soon as I came across that idea and this, gentleman named Henri Dericourt, who was thought to have potentially been quite senior in the SOE,

For how long could you keep a secret? In the case of Joan Bright Astley, the answer was ‘To the grave.' Acclaimed novelist and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz and host Alice Loxton offer up a gift from the real-life Miss Moneypenny – a formidable woman who protected the secrets of the notorious Special Operations Executive for as long as she lived. From SPYSCAPE, the home of secrets. A Cup And Nuzzle production. Series produced by Alex Burnard, Morgan Childs, Claire Crofton, Joe Foley, Frank Palmer, Kellie Redmond and Isabel Sutton. Music by Nick Ryan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Show Notes and Transcript Retired CIA officer Sam Faddis is a regular security expert on War Room and he joins Hearts of Oak to look at the terror threat within the US.  His Substack goes in depth on the many hazards that we face externally and we pick up on some of his recent articles.  We start by looking at open borders and why the establishment won't cut off illegal immigration.  The US have endured an onslaught of unknown individuals, when a country is not able to know who is within its borders then it has no idea what perils it faces internally.  It is a dangerous situation that America finds itself in.  Sam shows us why and how the FBI has spent its time focusing on groups like Moms for Liberty which seems like political targeting and is quite simply illegal.  Then we move onto looking at how the situation in Israel could affect the US before finishing on how China has imbedded itself into the establishment and throughout the system. Sam Faddis is a Retired CIA Operations Officer. Served in Near East and South Asia. Author, commentator. Senior Editor AND Magazine. Public Speaker. Host of Ground Truth. Connect with Sam... X                   https://x.com/RealSamFaddis?s=20 GETTR          https://gettr.com/user/samfaddis SUBSTACK   https://substack.com/profile/28080362-sam-faddis                       https://andmagazine.substack.com/                       https://andmagazine.substack.com/s/ground-truth Interview recorded 28.11.23 Audio Podcast version available on Podbean and all major podcast directories...  ⁣https://heartsofoak.podbean.com/ Transcript available on our Substack...https://heartsofoak.substack.com/ To sign up for our weekly email, find our social media, podcasts, video, livestreaming platforms and more... https://heartsofoak.org/connect/ Support Hearts of Oak by purchasing one of our fancy T-Shirts.... https://heartsofoak.org/shop/ Transcript (Hearts of Oak) It's wonderful to have you with us. Thank you so much for your time today. (Sam Faddis) Thank you for having me, appreciate it.  Not all, I've enjoyed your many times on War Room and maybe we'll touch on that before we get on to everything else. But obviously people can find you @RealSamFaddis on Twitter, @ANDMagazine also. And I think Substack certainly, what I enjoy is andmagazine.substack.com. Everything is in the description. And I think that's where you put a lot of your longer pieces. So if people enjoy the Twitter, they can jump on and look at the Substack. And of course, Sam, you're a retired CIA officer, served in Near East and South Asia, author, commentator, and of course, senior editor of AND Magazine. And certainly for me, as maybe for many others, what often happens, people coming on Steve Bannon's War Room, it opens a window. Maybe we can just touch on that. It's always fun to ask people how they ended up being on War Room and they will jump on, I think, a lot of the threats, the terror threats currently inside the US. So, what about yourself? How did you end up being on War Room? Yeah, I don't... I think my contact with Steve goes back to when he and Jack Maxey were still working together. And we got particularly deeply involved regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story, because when they got a hold of a copy of the hard drive, one of the first things they wanted to do was make sure that they weren't being played, that this was in fact, something real, they weren't going to run with it. And, you know, they were more than happy to run with it if it was real and authentic, which it is, but they wanted to do their homework first. So they called me in as an old, CIA operator to take a look at this thing and say, Hey, do you think this thing's real? Or is there anything to this accusation that it's Russian disinformation? And after about, I mean, I spent the whole night down, I showed up in DC one night and spent the whole night down in a townhouse in Capitol Hill with those guys going through it. But I can tell you that it took me about five minutes to be able to tell them. It is impossible for somebody to have faked this thing. That's completely ludicrous. If you came to me when I was operating and said, do this to somebody else, I would have said. No can do, man. I mean, can I make up a fake laptop? Yeah. Will it stand more than about five minutes scrutiny from an adversary who knows what they're doing? No, it will not. It will be obvious for a million reasons. And we've obviously delved into that with Miranda Devine, laptop from hell, Garrett Ziegler on a number of times and and as a huge and you wonder why the media don't wake up to that fact. But that and many, many others. But of course your background, CIA background, that intelligence side, and on your Substack lots of really interesting articles and I think for me it's the concern about the terror threat within the U.S. We talk a lot about what's happening externally. But really the big concern I have looking across the water and we have in the UK, having open borders is the terror threat within here in the UK, as you're concerned over there in the States. And maybe look at the border, because one of your recent Substack posts was the trade in asylum seekers, why the establishment won't cut off illegal immigration. And the issue of open border means the opposite of a purpose of government, isn't it? A government should be closing the borders, protecting its citizens, and this administration seems to want the opposite. So, what are your thoughts as you look on that open border policy? Well, as you well know, given your trade, you know, language can either be used to illuminate or obfuscate. We spend a lot of time listening to this administration use language to obfuscate, to dance around, to pretend, let's just be clear. This administration's policy is open borders. That's the Biden administration's policy is we don't have a border. So nobody in Congress changed the law. Nobody legislated that. The American people didn't decide that. These guys just basically decided, without ever admitting so, that they will not enforce the existing law. If you show up at the border, you're processed, you're handed a notice to appear for a hearing, which may be five to 10 years in the future, and you're cut loose. Actually, you're probably transported onto your onward destination like Chicago or New York. Once you have that hearing notice in hand, by the way, if anybody stops you, you just tell them you're waiting for your hearing. It in fact functions as a permit. In fact, the illegals refer to it as a permit. So that's our policy and we don't, there's no magic database to check these people. We have no idea who they are. We have no idea if the documents they're carrying, if any, are real. So anybody and everybody can walk into the United States. So why? Well, I mean, ideologically, a lot of these people frankly don't believe we have a right to control our borders. But there's also just a lot of money here, right? I mean, there's a huge garment industry as an example in Southern, California around Los Angeles, actually a large number of clothes a large amount of clothing that's made in the United States. It's all made by illegals. I mean if you walked into a shop and there's 300 people in the room and you found one of them who actually had legal documentation to be in the United States. You'd probably die of shock. Everybody knows that. You go to Alabama chicken processing plants for folks to stand on their feet for 10 or 12 hours a day and they gut and pluck chickens not exactly pleasant work. I've done a little bit of it once upon a time. Okay Who does that? Again, if there's 600 people in the plant and you found one that actually has permission to be in the United States and be working. You'd be stunned. So what we have I could go on obviously, I mean you get the point, there's a lot of folks here who are pretending like somehow they're welcoming the poor of the planet and doing something philanthropic. That's not what's happening. They're making a boatload of money. In the article that you referenced, we talked about how, for instance, in New York State, they actually run a state website where employers can go on the website and advertise jobs and that's specifically marketed to illegals. Now, they don't use that terminology, illegals, but that's what it is. It is a state-run website to match up employers with folks who will, again, when it's all said and done, they will work off the books for less than minimum wage. And none of these guys are gonna complain about workplace safety. I mean, if you think about it, it's kind of sick. Here's the Democratic Party pushes this, supposedly the party of the working man. This is a war on American working men and women. It's none of these pesky unions, man. We're gonna deal with folks that are about one step above slaves. Yeah and I get that and that was a conversation I had in the Brexit debate in the UK talking to voters and you talk to small businesses and they wanted cheap labour, they want a free movement of people and I get the economic argument on that but then you move over on to the security issue and just because you let someone in for, they can cheap labour, if you're not checking who that person is, then you have no idea who is in the country. And it surprises me why, you're on a scale well above what the UK is on, but it surprises me why the media and politicians don't really call this out for what it is, which is a massive security risk for the US. Without question. I mean, first of all, people talk in terms of checking names against databases. Okay, so first of all, let's just assume that happens. What database? I mean, a database consists is only as good as the data that goes into it. What's the premise there? We have a magic database with the names of all the members of Al Qaeda and Hezbollah and Hamas in it. There is no such database. The guy's name is the name of John Smith, something generic. Born in some village nobody ever heard of in Pakistan, okay? You know what you're gonna find? You're gonna find there's no data in your laptop. Does that mean that he's good? It doesn't mean anything. That's, by the way, assuming he's actually telling you his real name. Hezbollah is an example. Hezbollah has a longstanding relationship with Venezuela. They are very serious boys. I've worked against them all over the planet. They plan years and years in advance, they're very meticulous. They don't show up one day and say, let's blow something up. They flip a switch on and off that they've been working for five years. Pre-positioned explosives, case targets, all this. They have a relationship with Venezuela. Venezuela gives them full sets of false identity documents, passport, driver's license, etc., backstopped by the Venezuelan government. Meaning if you ask the Venezuelans, is this guy Jose one of yours? They'll say yes because they gave him the docks as part of their deal. Number one group of people coming out of Central and South America into the United States right now Venezuelans. That is not me saying obviously that every Venezuelan walking into the United States is a terrorist, I'm just saying when you have a flood of people like that and you know you have this capability. It's the simplest thing in the world to insert into that stream guys who are operatives and we have no capacity for detecting them and we have caught them on U.S. soil before. Where they have been here for years and years and years working targets, New York City, Washington DC, Chicago. So yeah, there's a clock ticking out there someplace. Isn't there? It's just you know I mean, when stuff starts to blow up, is there really anybody with a straight face is going to turn around and say, wow, that was unforeseeable, I'm shocked. We're just waiting for it now.  Well, I mean, your time working abroad with the CIA and you're dealing with, countries and individuals and situations which you wouldn't expect to find at home, and I've talked to other people working in the field at different ops. And I think the assumption was, and I assume the assumption is that the intelligence services abroad for the US that, you know, there is trust in what happens back home. There is trust in the borders, in the systems, and you're doing what you do abroad because you know you've got the backing of the US, but also, you know, there's protection there in the US and that's not even touching on the military. Is just touching on the institutions and the border. And if that's no longer there, then kind of you wonder, what is the point of intelligence abroad whenever there's no kind of backstop there back in the US? Yeah, there is no point. I mean, again, this is what I think people need to understand, and they don't, and maybe on some level, they don't want to, right? Because the enormity, first of all, it's staggering and hard to get your head around. But also, you kind of just don't want to face this reality because it's very unpleasant. We don't have a border in the United States functionally. I mean, we have guys that process illegals and then put them on buses and send them to Chicago. We've turned border patrol into welcome wagon, but we don't, we don't, our defences are down. I mean, you're living in a house in a bad neighbourhood and the doors are unlocked and the windows are open and nobody's paying attention. So is it hard to predict what will happen? It will not right now, look at what's happening in the middle East. I mean, you could send intelligence message after intelligence message out of the Middle East from a CIA station, saying everybody and his brother is planning on blowing stuff up all across the United States. Nobody's gonna react to it, nobody's gonna do anything about it. They have politically decided to ignore it. And God willing, somehow miraculously, this will not happen, but I don't see how we will avoid it. People are going to die. We are going to get hit again. And people should keep in mind that when 9-11 happened. Al-Qaeda, just as an example, they never conceived of that as the end of anything, nor did they conceive of that as the worst they could do. So they have never, and many of the other groups, never given up their ambitions for biological, chemical, nuclear, radiological attacks. So as horrible as 9-11 was, what you could see would potentially be much, much worse than that. What do you think as someone who is working abroad on the field, seeing obviously what's happened with not only Afghanistan, but then you mentioned the threat of Iran not being neutralised and that being left to fester and grow and continue to be a threat. And I guess, and it's not, it is one way pointing the finger at the Democrats because of what has happened, but maybe other administrations haven't maybe dealt with that threat either. Does that make any sense or is that on the ball? No, it makes no sense at all. And again, yeah, I'm not going to try to lay all of the issues here squarely and purely at the foot of the Biden administration. Not that they don't. Not that they are working overtime to mess things up. But yeah, we've made mistakes in regard to Iran as an example for a really long time. I mean, look, I've worked with a lot of Iranians, Iranian patriots over the years who are fighting for freedom in their country. I got nothing but respect for the Iranian people, Persian culture, Persian history. But the boys that are in charge in Tehran the IRGC and the ayatollahs are psychos. I mean they they they have an expressly apocalyptic view of history. They believe these are the end times literally in the way, somebody who's a true believer in the literal word of the Bible might believe these are the end times. That's a reality. That's not, that's not a metaphor. These are the end times. The Mahdi, who they regard as an Islamic superman prophet, is about to come back. And there's going to be a giant, fiery end to the world, and they emerge as the winners, and you're all either with them or you're gone. So that's the way they look at the world. Now, these guys have been on a course to acquire nuclear weapons for decades now. Their nuclear program exists for one purpose, for nuclear weapons. Everything else is garbage, just dispense with the nonsense. We keep reading things like, you know, the latest I read was an assessment that's now seven months old that said we think the Iranians are 12 days from having a nuke. Okay, so I'm not a math genius, but I'm pretty sure that if it's been seven months and you told me they were 12 days away. That by this point you should assume they have a nuclear weapon and anybody who thinks that our intelligence collection is so good, that we will know for sure in advance. That they're about to acquire it is living in dreamland. Not true but nobody will know that. Even the Israelis who have a really robust, they basically, you live in a world right now where you could wake up tomorrow and realize not just that they just got the bomb, but they have had the bomb for some period of time. So, I mean, a nuclear Iran that can actually vaporize Tel Aviv, that's the end of peace in the Middle East. You just set that whole region on fire. The Israelis will not live with that. What are we doing? We're shipping billions of dollars to the Ayatollahs. That's what we've been doing under this administration. We've been ransoming hostages. Look at the situation in Afghanistan. I mean, Biden wants everybody to forget about it because politically it's a disaster. All right, let's get down to the real implications. It's a terrorist super state. It's a safe haven for Al Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is at least as strong as they've ever been, and now they have a much more powerful, secure foundation. The Taliban is waging war to topple the government in Islamabad next door. Maybe you don't care about the Pakistanis. They happen to have about 200 functional nuclear weapons, plus the means to deliver them. So if Islamabad falls, that means all of a sudden Al-Qaeda and Taliban are one of the top nuclear powers on the planet. That's kind of a big deal. Somebody ought to be paying attention to that. We can't let that happen, yet we are doing nothing to stop it. I mean tell, because one of the other articles was standby for another intelligence failure. I think it's the most recent one. Joe does not in his terror threat here at home escalates. And on that you touch on what's happening in Israel and you touch on Iran. I mean, how does that affect? Because America has never been weaker militarily and from a completely civilian point of view seems to never have been at a weaker place in regards to intelligence. Where does that leave America with what is currently happening in the Middle East? Well, it leaves us functionally blind, and I think there are probably two sides to that coin. One is the part where you give warning to the policy makers, to the politicians, and it doesn't happen to fit with their agenda, so they ignore you. We did a lot of this in the run-up to 9-11, which is not to say we had specific information on that plot, but it wasn't exactly a secret to anybody working the target that they're serious and they're coming for us. By the way, they already blew up two of our embassies, tried to take down the World Trade Center once before, and almost sank the USS Cole in Yemen. So for real, guys, they're coming. That didn't fit with Bill Clinton's peace dividend agenda. And we're now at the end of times, and it's every kinder, gentler planet. And the Bush administration didn't seem particularly focused on it before 9-11. So I did a lot of that. I was involved with a lot of that, and as was my wife, who's also a retired agency officer, as were any number of our friends. It's not just me. A whole bunch of guys over a whole bunch of years saying, we better go take care of this Bin Laden guy before something really catastrophic happens and it's ignored. And the second part is just a decrease in collection capability. And we absolutely do not have the collection capability we need. Anybody, Afghanistan is under the control of the Taliban and they got billions of dollars worth of our gear and the international community, including the United States keeps sending them money, calling it humanitarian funding. Anybody who thinks they're using that to buy baby formula is on drugs. So, and you've got every group in the world, including Al-Qaeda back there with, training camps and a completely safe platform from which to plan, train, and launch attack. What if, I don't under anybody who thinks we have any collection capability on the ground in Afghanistan at this point that's worth anything. Again is in dreamland. I mean you can take pictures of it from space and you can listen to, you can surf the internet and intercept email messages. You know, it took us ten years to find Bin Laden because he didn't use the internet and he didn't use a cell phone He recognized the capacity. He ran an entire worldwide outfit for 10 years after we took Afghanistan. Took us 10 years to find him. Why? Because he understood our technical capability, and he knew we didn't have the sources we needed to find him. So we don't have robust, we have essentially no capability in Afghanistan. We have no idea what they're plotting, what they're planning, how many attacks are being hatched over there.  And when I've talked to friends, background intelligence, it's all about assets and having people on the ground and that information. Is it simply with the move, the technological move? Is it that the focus is we can now do everything with technology and the hard work on the ground is simply ignored? Is that maybe the focus of politicians? The focus of politicians is also, unfortunately, the focus of too many people inside the intelligence community, right? I mean, one of the things the United States, just to stick with us as an example, that we do pretty well is allocate money, buy stuff, build buildings, fill them with people looking at flat screen computer monitors, doing PowerPoint presentations, generate a lot of this stuff, build a machine that flies around in space and sucks up signals. Okay, now espionage is not at all like that. Espionage is weird, arcane, old art, really realistically probably hasn't changed for thousands of years, meaningfully, because it's all about human nature. So as long as people are people, it's going to be the same thing. You need this very eclectic group of individuals, often drawn from a whole bunch of very disparate backgrounds, kind of people who in another lifetime would be stealing the crown jewels, who aren't very comfortable colouring within the lines all the time, but they have enough self-control to not go totally off the reservation, if you will. In other words, they'll do it for a good cause. And then you got to train them really well, and then you got to season them really well. Like you got, I mean, when I showed up at my first field station, it was more or less an attitude like, yeah, you go make like 500 asset meetings, and then we might let you talk in the morning meeting when we all get together. Because right now, you know so little, you don't even know what you don't know. And then you got to trust instincts. It's got to be a very flat, nimble organization. If I'm talking to a source in Turkey, and I got an opportunity to do something inside Iran, we need to exploit that opportunity really fast. I don't mean like I should have carte blanche to just do whatever the hell I want, but I just, we got to move. We got a window of opportunity. We got, let's go. I can't send that message back to headquarters and wait six months while they go through 27 levels of review and committees of people who've never been overseas discuss whether or not this is a good idea, right? The really good organizations in history. Have had that capacity, I mean, one, I've done a lot of study over the years of the American OSS in the Second World War, but also SOE, the Special Operations Executive, the British equivalent that was, predates OSS and obviously was the template for OSS. Read the history of that, man, it's a, you know, a bunch of guys like Patrick Leigh Fairmoor that walked across Europe sleeping in barns before the war and, spoke classical Greek and, just this weird combination of things who the next thing you know, they're on Crete and they're dreaming up operations to kidnap Nazi generals. And they actually pull it off like two guys and a handful of Greeks do this. Good lord, if you sent that proposal to Langley these days. You know, you would have no chance on earth of that thing ever being approved. They would come back with nine million reasons why that won't work, and you'd get tired of trying to explain it to them. You'd just be, okay, whatever, too much trouble, leave it alone. Now, I want to ask you about to the domestic side. It seems, again, as someone looking from the outside in, it seems the role of the FBI is now no longer about catching real threats within the US and is more focused on, I mean, whenever Moms for Liberty was declared an extremist organization and those who want to stand up for common sense and basically values of life and liberty and freedom, those are now the ones in the crosshairs. I mean, how has that change happened? Is that just because it's easier to focus on those type of people because they don't push back, they're not a threat. Has there been an active decision to see those people standing up for American values as a threat as opposed to others, maybe the Islamist type? Tell us how that change has happened and what that means for the fabric of the U.S. Well, first of all, it's catastrophic for the United States, right? I mean, intelligence agencies. Intelligence agencies shouldn't be within 10 miles of American domestic politics. It's illegal, it's unconstitutional, it's immoral, and they should never be, even when they've got to deal with domestic things like the FBI, they should never, never should be partisan. Again, that's illegal and unconstitutional and so forth. I think you have you have like two problems that are affecting both the FBI the CIA and a bunch of other agencies one is bureaucratization which kind of bureaucratic hardening of the arteries the organizations go soft. You stop having guys at the top who made their bones running operations, whether we're talking about the Bureau or CIA now, you got guys who have played political games. And then we have politicization in the sense of American domestic politics. We have outfits that should not have come anywhere near this, that at least at the senior levels have become very politicized. I mean, the Moms with Liberty thing is a great example. I have a, where I live in the state of Pennsylvania, I have a lot of contact with Moms of Liberty because of other things that we do, my wife and I. You know, you're talking about an organization, the centre of gravity is a 55 to 60 year old grandmother. And Moms for Liberty's primary focus is things like, why is this book filled with sexually explicit drawings in an elementary school library accessible to my eight-year-old? I'm not trying to ban the book, burn the book, demonize the person who wrote it. It's just age-inappropriate. It shouldn't be available to kids. It's not exactly incendiary. It's certainly not domestic violent extremism. So, it's insane that the Bureau would label these guys as an organization like that, as being a danger to anything. Not a danger. They're people involved in a political process expressing actually what are really common sense things. So, hugely dangerous. You know, and I think the problem is primarily at the senior levels, but I'm honest enough to say, and I've had this discussion with many old colleagues, you know, I'm still waiting for the day when somebody comes to an FBI SWAT team leader and says, I want you to go at five o'clock in the morning with 25 guys, all gunned up and arrest this 75-year-old guy for praying silently outside an abortion clinic. I think it would be nice to see the day where the guy would say, that's a really interesting idea, man, but I'm not doing that. I'm not the Gestapo, I'm not your secret police. It's not happening, my guys aren't going, you want my badge? Take my badge, but I'm not doing that. When they went to arrest Roger Stone, okay? On what, if you believe there was a crime, would have been at most a white collar crime. So what's the procedure in the United States, you contact the guy's lawyer and you ask him to come down to the courthouse? He shows up you charge him and then typically he's released and he walks out the door, happens all day every day all over America. That's the m.o. Nobody sends a gunboat and an armoured car and a squad of guys, with machine guns to arrest a man who's what 80 years old and by the way stands about 5'3 and, at that towers over his wife who has heart trouble and you're gonna go show up at his doorstep at 4.35 o'clock in the morning I mean come, on that's you are utilizing the law enforcement power of the United States government to intimidate political opponents. Straight up. Not okay. And I guess that infiltration, that change of thinking, that doesn't change just with administration. Something is deeper than that and there is no necessary quick fix for it. Well, I mean, let me let me focus on the CIA, but we could be talking about several organizations in addition to the FBI. Is it fixable? Yeah, I think it's fixable. I mean, first you have, but you need somebody who understands the outfit, because if you send somebody from the outside to CIA, they will be led around by the nose and played by the guys inside, and they will have no idea what's going on. But the key factor is really you have to have a president of the United States who says, go there, break as much China as you have to, fire as many people as you have to, get it back on track and get it back to work. Now, I've said this many times. I believe if you did that, and you went to CIA as an example, and tossed out folks who have clearly crossed the line on political considerations as an example, and just said, we're going back to work, We're going back to business, we're doing the people's business. I think you'd actually honestly have people standing in the halls cheering. I think the rank and file would be, thank God. Like, you don't go to CIA for the pay check. I mean, you don't starve, but you don't get rich. And you make a tremendous number of sacrifices, and you do a lot of interesting stuff, but you also live some places that are hard. And you certainly put your family through a lot of hell along the way. So really people come there for a reason and because they, as hokey as it may sound, they believe in the mission and they can see when they're not being allowed to do the job. They can see when a guy's getting promoted that has never done anything, but he laughs at the boss's jokes. They're not stupid. And tell me, some of the threat we talked about earlier, the Middle East, you've got that Islamic threat, you've got a completely different way of life and a different viewpoint on how things should end. But another article you wrote recently in the Substack, was looking at China and that threat, Biden meets Xi for talking's sake. And we've certainly had massive concerns here in the UK of that Chinese influence in our education system and much wider. You've probably had similar in education in the political system. That's another threat which is there internally and no one seems to want to deal with it. We've just had David Cameron coming back in the UK as the Foreign Secretary, one of the most pro-China political leaders in a generation. You probably have the same. So tell us about that. That article of Xi coming over and Biden being his lapdog, basically, being summoned to San Francisco. What's your concern of the Chinese influence and where that can take America? Yeah, well, let me state up front, you know, I was a case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, which is what any normal person would refer to as a spy or a spook. CIA doesn't. Those terms are used differently at CIA. Anyway, what was my job? Well, my job is to do a whole bunch of stuff, but the guts of what you get paid to do as an ops officer, as a case officer, is recruit sources inside target organizations. So in other words, my job to do to the enemy what they're trying to do to us. It is my job to get the Chinese intelligence officer to work for us, the Russian SVR guy to work for us, to get a guy inside Al Qaeda to work for us. So when I say that, not like a hooray for me speech, but as a, when I'm talking about people being recruited and how this works, it's not because I read a book about it one time, it's because this is what I did for a very, very long time, with I think some significant effect. What the Chinese do on an industrial scale is they engage in what's called elite capture, their term. That means they come in and they recruit, they gain control of, they buy, whatever verbiage resonates with you. Influential people in target countries. So that's politicians, could be military officers, corporate leaders, whoever they think has power in that country and can further their interest, they buy them and they gain control over them. They don't do them a favour and then hope later they'll do them a favour. That's what diplomats do. They gain control over them. They stick their, they, you know, they push the buttons in your head, whatever it takes, man. They stroke your ego, feed you money, produce attractive young female agents. Whatever floats your boat, whatever is the key that unlocks you, that's what they do. That's how spies work. Okay, we know that. There's no controversy about this, not a conspiracy theory. It's done worldwide on industrial scale. Not surprisingly, target number one for the Chinese Communist Party Intel guys would be the United States of America. They do this all over the United States. God knows how many guys in Congress they have turned. God knows how many corporate leaders. Look at Joe Biden, right? I mean, again, let's stop beating around the bush and playing games. This is a guy who's taken, I think Miranda Devine's best estimate is at least $31 million flowed to the Biden's from China, from individuals who are directly connected to Chinese intelligence. So let's just take the ambiguity out. Chinese spies funnelled at least $31 million to the Biden's. They didn't give it to Hunter for his good looks, or because of his cocaine user. I mean, there's only one product that Biden's had to sell and that was Joe. The Chinese communists are a lot of things, they're not idiots and they just don't throw money away. So we know all that money flowed to him and we know it came from folks directly connected Chinese Communist Party and Chinese Intel. There's only one question left to ask, what did they get and are they getting in return? You might hand a chunk of change to Hunter one time because he claimed he could do something and then it turned out he couldn't produce and you think okay, nothing ventured nothing gained. We lost the bucks move on, you would not continue to hand millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars to these guys unless something was coming back the other way. So when you put Xi and Joe in a room together and people seriously talk as if Joe is representing the interests of the United States of America. I'm just shaking my head. I'm like, really? Because he's sitting in a room with a guy that, as far as I can tell, bought him years ago. He owns the man. And if you really internalize that, the implications for American national security and the entire free world are terrifying, because it doesn't matter how many carrier battle groups you have, or nuclear weapons. Look, I'm kind of a history nerd. Once upon a time, the British East India Company took over India. They fought a battle at Plessy, I believe, and they defeated a vastly superior Indian army. Now, taking nothing away from the British army, who did a superb job. Number one reason they won the battle, because they bought off the commander of the Indian army, who sat on the side-lines with something like 80%, of the Indian forces and watched while his master and the rest of them were destroyed. Like they just, simple solution, we'll buy this guy off and they'll sit on their hands and watch. So I mean, if the Chinese move on Taiwan tomorrow and you're counting on Joe Biden to be the guy that gives the order to the 7th Fleet to save the day. Good luck, man. What's your, just so we finish off, what is your big concern with the life you've led, with your experience, seen so much and how foreign agencies work, foreign governments work, that ongoing battle, to fight for, I guess, the freedom in the US. What are your kind of big concerns when you look at the US and what has happened? Because obviously a lot of what's happened has been enabled politically, but it's also been enabled in the media, in many, economically, that's been a way in for China. But what to you is probably your major concern of where America currently is? See, here's the way I would sum it up. I think since 1945, the American people have taken for granted the fact that the United States is the preeminent political, military, and economic power on the planet. That's just sort of bedrock, and it's almost like a law of nature now. So things are good sometimes and less good other times, and occasionally we get dragged into a war, and then after a while, we get tired of the war and we go home. Well, we don't think we actually lost our status as the number one power. And even when we leave Afghanistan, we don't think we don't really think of it as we got beat. We think of it as maybe we shouldn't have been there and we got tired of it and we went home. Nobody's dictating articles of surrender on a battleship like we did to the Japanese in 1945. And we sort of assume that, again, that that's, you know, U.S. Military's the most powerful, our economy's the biggest, yada yada. There are no, of course, laws of physics that says that is true. And we've touched on some of the reasons, but we could go on probably all day talking about there's a lot of really catastrophic stuff happening around the planet. Between the Chinese, the possibility the Iranians are going to get nuclear weapons, Pakistan falls and all of a sudden the Taliban has 200 nuclear weapons. Terror attacks inside the United States. I hate this word because it gets overused, but you're actually beginning to talk about things that are existential when it comes to the United States. You're actually, I've said this to numerous people, you could realize that the Chinese could move on Taiwan and a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier could go to the bottom of the Pacific and you realize you don't have one west of San Diego. And all of a sudden right there the status quo that has existed since 1945 where the Pacific is an American Lake ceased to exist guys but the Chinese aren't in San Francisco yet, but, you are no longer everybody in the entire all of East Asia now lives with a new reality, Nope, the South Koreans the Japanese. What are they going to do just fend for themselves? That kind of stuff is already starting to happen all over the planet, and we're either facilitating it or just blissfully ignorant to it, but we're not doing anything to stop it. What happens if the Iranians wake up? What happens if the Iranians detonate a nuclear weapon in the desert and say, we have 12 more? And guess what? But we already moved half of them to places like Lebanon, under the control of Hezbollah, to locations you don't know about and where you can't stop us from launching them. So you Israelis knock yourselves out bombing sites in Iran. We didn't tell you this until we had already taken steps. Now you live in a world where the Iranians can wink the state of Israel out of existence, literally, because Israel's a tiny place, right? Two or three nuclear weapons and Israel doesn't exist anymore. It is that danger. It's that like we're teetering on the edge of a cliff and yet we're not, don't seem to actually be doing anything about it. Well Sam I appreciate you coming on. I think it is so important for the public to understand the perilous situation which we do face and I've thoroughly enjoyed your many times on War Room. So thank you so much for giving us your time today in sharing some of those insights. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Women have been part of the espionage world since intelligence agencies were established in the early 1900s, so it's no great surprise that they became key assets during the First and Second World Wars, but what does that mean?Historian Helen Fry talks with our editor about Mata Hari, Edith Cavell and other less known stories from the Cambridge Spies to the Special Operations Executive.Helen is the author of Women in Intelligence: The Hidden History of Two World WarsHelen Fry LinksWomen in Intelligence: The Hidden History of Two World WarsHelen on XOllie LinksOllie on Xhistory@aspectsofhistory.com

Kelly Rimmer talks to Cheryl Akle about the work involved in owning a bookstore, and the female Special Operations Executive agents of WWII who inspired her latest novel, The Paris Agent. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stéphane Bern, s'amuse avec l'Histoire – la grande, la petite, la moyenne… - et retrace les destins extraordinaires de personnalités qui n'auraient jamais pu se croiser, pour deux heures où le savoir et l'humour avancent main dans la main. Aujourd'hui, le Special Operations Executive, l'armée secrète de Winston Churchill.

Stéphane Bern raconte une armée britannique qui a œuvré pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, indépendante du ministère de la Guerre, chargée d'espionner les ennemis nazis et de multiplier les actes de sabotage. Ou la véritable histoire du Spécial Operation Executive, l'armée secrète de Winston Churchill.Qui sont les agents de cette armée secrète ? Comment ont-ils participé à la Résistance en France ? Et pourquoi ces agents britanniques irritaient-ils au plus haut point le Général de Gaulle ?Pour en parler, Stéphane Bern reçoit l'historien Olivier Wieviorka et la documentariste Cécile Coolen, auteurs du documentaire “La résistance au service de Sa Majesté”(disponible sur arte.tv).

Stéphane Bern, s'amuse avec l'Histoire – la grande, la petite, la moyenne… - et retrace les destins extraordinaires de personnalités qui n'auraient jamais pu se croiser, pour deux heures où le savoir et l'humour avancent main dans la main. Aujourd'hui, le Special Operations Executive, l'armée secrète de Winston Churchill.

Matt Stevens transitioned from the U.S. Navy in July 2017 after serving for 26 years as a SEAL. He attended The Honor Foundation's (THF) inaugural East Coast class in the Spring of 2016, joined the THF SOF Advisory Board in the Spring of 2017, and then joined THF's Board of Directors in February 2018. Throughout his career, Matt served as a Special Operations Executive leading high-performing teams conducting our nation's most sensitive operations, cultivating interagency relationships and executing plans in dynamic environments. Matt served on the leadership team of an emerging technology company from 2017-2019 before assuming the role of Chief Executive Officer of THF. In this engaging conversation, Sarah interviews Matt Stevens, a former US Navy SEAL with 26 years of service. Matt's career journey is highlighted, including his transition from the Navy, involvement with the Honor Foundation, and his experiences as a SEAL team leader. Matt emphasizes the importance of trust and credibility in leadership, earned through tactical proficiency, keeping promises, and vulnerability. He also discusses the influence of mentors and the need to adapt leadership styles to different situations.  Matt shares how the Honor Foundation has been instrumental in helping Special Operations veterans find fulfilling post-military careers through personalized coaching, networking opportunities, and support. Matt's passion for helping his fellow veterans shines through as he shares success stories of program participants who have found meaningful careers and the joy of giving back by becoming coaches and instructors for the foundation. The conversation also touches on the organization's future goals, including expanding its reach to more transitioning veterans across the country. “In my work now at the Honor Foundation, I see that a lot of folks think that every single person who was in the military probably has PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, and they were like in gunfights every day of every month of every year for 20 years. And it's just not the case.” - Matt Stevens This week on Executive Decisions: Introduction to Matt Steven's background. Where did Matt find his start as a leader? How to become an effective leader. Mentors and leadership style. Managing risk and saying no. Making the decision to retire from the military. The importance of educating veterans about the business world. The first class at the Honor Foundation. How the Honor Foundation has evolved under Matt's leadership. Traveling as a family. Staying on top of life outside of work. Our Favorite Quotes: "We don't charge transitioning veterans anything; we go out and hustle and raise the money. So they don't have a financial burden while they're getting out of the military and losing that steady income stream." - Matt Stevens “I always just find it fascinating to hear as people have successful careers as leaders, where they found their start. And it could be something as basic as a paper route” - Sarah Delahanty "Success for us is somebody finding fulfillment as defined by them. It's not about how much money they're going to make or what school they're going to get into." - Matt Stevens “Title and the rank are just one component, then you have to earn the trust of the people behind you and they have to earn yours. A trust transfer in the relationship where they then follow you because they believe in you and you believe in them.” - Sarah Delahanty "We will never degrade the quality of what we're doing. It's a platinum standard, and we want to give that to any special operator who wants it." - Matt Stevens "It's not just all about 'help the veterans'; it's like, hey, how do you want to help your own business? You might consider hiring some of these rock stars who are probably gonna run circles around some of your other folks." - Matt Stevens "Scaling that jump in scale, at some point, is going to be huge. We're always thinking about how to grow what we're doing without degrading quality at all." - Matt Stevens Connect with Matt Stevens: The Honor Foundation Website The Honor Foundation on Facebook The Honor Foundation on Instagram The Honor Foundation on LinkedIN Email Matt: matt@honor.org About SYM Financial and Executive Decisions Podcast Executive Decisions is a show for business leaders. In each episode, host and financial advisor Sarah Delahanty sits down with executives and local experts who serve them. Together, they tackle some of the harder questions that business leaders face today. From inspiring creativity in the workplace, to managing company politics, to making the best choices with executive compensation, taxes, and lifestyle — our show delivers stories and lessons learned across many industries and lifetimes.  Email Sarah at sdelahanty@sym.com with questions, comments, and to schedule a one-on-one conversation.  Follow Sarah on LinkedIn Follow SYM Financial on Facebook Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts  Amazon Music/Audible Spotify Stitcher And, if you enjoy the show, please leave a review to help others discover the podcast. Disclosure: Certain links above are to third-party sites and are not affiliated with SYM Financial Corporation (“SYM”). SYM is an independent investment adviser registered under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, as amended. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training. More information about SYM including our investment strategies, fees and objectives can be found in our ADV Part 2, which is available upon request.

On Binge Reading today, USA Today bestselling author A.W. Hartoin talks about her World War II, Stella Bled spy thriller series, and the young American honeymooner who becomes a double agent, trapped into working for both Germany and England. Hi there. I'm your host, Jenny Wheeler, and on Binge Reading today, A.W. talks about the sixth book in the series, Her London Season. It's 1940 and the Battle of Britain rages in the skies overhead. Stella is stuck, frustrated, in a lowly administrative job at the Special Operations Executive, the SOE. Until a mysterious set of orders arrives. A.W. talks about crafting a story that challenges all the assumptions you may make about truth and power. Our Book Giveaway this week Our Giveaway this week is another Kobo Free Genre offer, a wonderful range of books from several genres - mystery, thriller  and romance, and all of them First in Series, including Poisoned Legacy, my Book #1 in the Of Gold & Blood series. Find the download link in the show notes for this episode on The Joys of Binge Reading website, that's www.thejoysofbinge reading.com. FREE KOBO GENRE LIST BOOKS ​https://www.kobo.com/nz/en/p/free-ebooks​​Kob​​o And remember. If you enjoy the show, leave us a review, so others will find us too. Word of mouth is still the best way for others to discover the show and great books they will definitely want to read. Links to subjects mentioned in today's episode Kristallnacht: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kristallnacht (*See Editor's note at the end of the transcript.) Kelly Rimmer, The Paris Agent, https://www.kellyrimmer.com/books/the-paris-agent Pam Jenoff, The Lost Girls of Paris, https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Girls-Paris-Pam-Jenoff/dp/0778308618 Martha Hall Kelly: Lilac Girls, https://marthahallkelly.com/books/lilac-girls/ Janet Evanovich:  https://evanovich.com/ Jana DeLeon:  https://janadeleon.com/ Brian Cann, photographer:  https://brian-cann.format.com/about Laser guided bomb systems:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser-guided_bomb The House Witch by Delemhach   https://www.amazon.com.au/House-Witch-Humorous-Romantic-Fantasy/dp/1039410251 Stephen King: The Shining, https://stephenking.com/works/novel/shining.html EM Powell: Stanton and Barling series. https://www.empowell.com/stanton-and-barling-mysteries Liane Moriarty: What Alice Forgot, https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781743535493/ The Splendid and the Vile by Eric Larson: https://www.amazon.com/Splendid-Vile-Churchill-Family-Defiance/dp/0385348711. The Rape of Europa by Lynn K Nicholas: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/121563/the-rape-of-europa-by-lynn-h-nicholas/ Kristin Hannah The Nightingale:  https://www.amazon.com/Nightingale-Novel-Kristin-Hannah/dp/1250080401 Where to find A.W. Hartoin online Website:  https://www.awhartoin.com/ Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/A.W.Hartoin/ Introducing mystery author A. W. Hartoin A.W. Hartoin - Best Selling mystery author. Jenny Wheeler: But now here's A.W. Hello there, A.W. and welcome to the show. It's great to have you with us. A.W. Hartoin: Hi Jenny. Thanks for having me. Jenny Wheeler: You've done a remarkably wide range of genres. You've done fantasy, you've done YA. But I think the bulk of your work has been in mystery, either Second World War, a series with Stella Bled, or a more contemporary cozy mystery series with Mercy Watts. So we'll be focusing on those two today because most of our listeners are really interested in those mainstream genres. I wondered first what has attracted you to the mystery genre. A.W. Hartoin: I've always loved my mystery since I was a child, but I think it's the puzzle pieces and how they come together, and planting little clues here and there. I've always loved plotting and mystery's all about the plotting And Cozy Mystery in particular is about characters and having really interesting people in t...

Summary Stephen Duffy (LinkedIn) joins Andrew (Twitter; LinkedIn) to discuss the spy stories of St. Ermin's Hotel in London. It includes links to SOE, MI6, Ian Fleming, and the Cambridge 5.  What You'll Learn Intelligence The origins of the SOE MI6 and the SOE in the hotel during WWII (bad neighbors!) Incredible female spies of WWII  St. Ermin's Cambridge Five connection The history of the hotel Reflections The stories a hotel could tell if it could talk Proximity to power And much, much more … *FULL SHOWNOTES & FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE* Episode Notes During World War II, the hotel was the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill's Special Operations Executive – a crucial element in his initiative to “set Europe ablaze.” Notorious spies Kim Philby and Donald Maclean were known to enjoy a drink at the hotel bar while sharing secrets with their Soviet handlers. And that's not all – to learn the rest, you'll have to listen to the episode.  Quotes of the Week “That's where Burgess, MacLean, and Philby at different times met their Russian handlers in plain sight and sat there and spoke normally. Didn't talk out the side of their mouths, didn't have red carnations and copies of the Financial Times under their arm. They just passed over their information, their paperwork or whatever, in plain sight to everybody.” – Stephen Duffy. *FULL SHOWNOTES & FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE* Resources  SURFACE SKIM *SpyCasts* Hitler's Trojan Horse – Nazi Intelligence with Nigel West (2023) Nazis on the Potomac – with former National Park Service Chief Historian Bob Sutton (2022) SPY@20: The Spy of the Century – Curators Alexis and Andrew on Kim Philby (2022) The Beverly Hills Spy – with The Hollywood Reporter's Seth Abramovitch (2022) *Beginner Resources* MI6 History & Facts, Encyclopedia Britannica (2022) [Brief history of MI6] World War 2 Chronology, B. Johnson, Historic UK (n.d.) [Timeline of Britain in WWII] How Churchill Led Britain to Victory in the Second World War, J. Taylor, Imperial War Museum (n.d.) [Short article] The St. Ermin's Autobiography, St. Ermin's Hotel (n.d.) [Pamphlet] *FULL SHOWNOTES & FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE* Primary Sources  File Release: Cold War Cambridge spies Burgess and Maclean, UK National Archives (2015) Alexander Simitch Stevens Oral History, Imperial War Museum (1992) Basil Davison Oral History, Imperial War Museum (1988) My Silent War, K. Philby (1967) SOE Training Advice on Disguise, UK National Archives (n.d.) *Wildcard Resource* The cocktail menu at St. Ermin's Caxton Bar features a number of spy-related references, including Bond's signature drink. To learn more about this “shaken, not stirred” beverage, check out this article for a brief history of the Vesper Martini.  *FULL SHOWNOTES & FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE*

In August 1944, Fred Bailey jumped out of a perfectly good airplane and parachuted into Nazi-occupied France, landing in a disused brickyard. Growing up he had been  a sickly child with a heart condition, which led his family to move out of London for his health. But in 1941 at age 18  he had joined the British Army's Royal Armored Corps, and served with the Desert Army. Bored after the fight for North Africa was over,  he volunteered for special duties, and soon found himself in the Special Operations Executive, assigned to be a radio officer in a Jedburgh team–groups of three soldiers designed to jump into France and support the French resistance in conjunction with the Allied invasion.  Fred Bailey died on January 29, 2023, at age 99, the last veteran of the Jedburgh teams living in Britain. When I read his obituary it seemed to me a very good time to have Ben Jones back on the podcast. Ben Jones is the State Historian of South Dakota and Director of the South Dakota State Historical Society, and he appeared in Episode 290 to talk about both of those jobs. But he is also a historian of the Second World War, and author of Eisenhower's Guerrillas: The Jedburghs, the Maquis, and the Liberation of France, which is the subject of our conversation today. For Further Investigation At the Imperial War Museum in London are records related to the Special Operations Executive, Section F, Operation Jedburgh. Among them are oral histories, including one with Fred Bailey. Recorded on December 11, 1990, it's wonderful. Interestingly Bailey emphatically says "we went in far too late...", and very crisply and incisively explains how the effects of the operation would have been better had they arrived two or three months before. You can also listen to his team leader, John Smallwood, talk about his experiences. Obituary of Fred Bailey Bernard Knox, "Premature Anti-Fascist" John K. Singlaub William Colby in Norway A Brian Lamb interview with Robert Merry about Joseph Alsop and (more importantly, for our conversation) Stewart Alsop    

We examine an iconic event from World War Two carried out by Greek and British members of the Special Operations Executive.  The SOE.   To help me with this is I am joined by Rick Stroud.  Rick, a director of film and television, has also published a number of books, mostly within the military sphere.  His latest, Lonely Courage, is the true story of SOE heroines in WW2.  As some of you know we published our own episode on Twentieth Century Heroines last year (that being Episode 11).  In 2014 Rick published Kidnap in Crete, the true story of the Abduction of a Nazi General.  This is our subject today.so it goes,Tom Assheton & James Jackson Route taken by PLF across Crete: https://patrickleighfermor.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/imgp5485.jpgRick Stroud latest book: https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Lonely-Courage/Rick-Stroud/9781471155666Reading:  Kidnap in Crete by Rick StroudSee also:YouTube: BloodyViolentHistoryhttps://www.instagram.com/bloodyviolenthistory/https://www.jamesjacksonbooks.comhttps://www.tomtom.co.uk If you enjoy the podcast, would you please leave a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify or Google Podcast App? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really helps to spread the wordSee https://simplecast.com/privacy/ for privacy information

January 2023  The Podcast Team wish all our listeners a Very Happy New Year.  To start the 2023 season of the podcast, producer Mark Cotton sits down with Oral History Officer Jonathan Byrne to catch-up on both our Roll of Honour and our continuing Oral History Project.  For the rest of the episode we have highlights of 3 selections from our Oral History Archive. As with previous years we have a theme … but this year the theme is unusual, they are all from people who didn't work at either GC&CS or its Outstations. We hear from the 14 year old girl who made vital deliveries to the Codebreakers, a member of S.O.E., the Special Operations Executive and finally a Luftwaffe Radio Operator. This episode features the following contributors from our Oral History Archive: Jean Barratt Lois Barefield Rudi Schoberl The Bletchley Park Roll of Honour can be found at: https://bletchleypark.org.uk/roll-of-honour/  Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2023 #BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #Enigma,

Nancy Wake was known by many names. The Nazis called her the White Mouse, a resourceful agent of the resistance, who evaded their clutches. Britain's Special Operations Executive called her Hélène. She was a key member of their Freelance cell, working to bring the Nazis down. To Marseille's high society, she was Madame Fiocca, an intrepid foreign journalist who fell in love with one of their most eligible bachelors, and subsequently become one of their own. To the French resistance she was the tough as nails Madame Andrée - she could kill a man with her bare hands.  To Australia, the land she fled in her teens she was Nancy Wake - war hero. This is part one of a Two Part series. Part Two will be up in a week's time.             Sources this week include: I'll update fully later, in the meantime, my main text was Nancy Wake by Peter Fitzsimons. The blog post of the episode is here. Support the show on Patreon for just $2 US a month and get access to exclusive content.       Please leave a like and review wherever you listen. The best way you can help support the show is to share an episode with a friend - Creative works grow best by word of mouth. I post episodes fortnightly, Wednesdays. Tales of History and Imagination is on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. The show has a YouTube Channel, largely for Audiogram advertisements.      Music, writing, narration, mixing normally all yours truly. This week I recorded covers of  Beautiful Dreamer (Stephen Foster) Moonlight Serenade (Glenn Miller, Mitchell Parish) Kiss Me Goodnight Sergeant Major (Art Noel, Don Pelosi) and Bless ‘em All (Fred Godfrey, Robert Kewley) Everything else is mine.    For more information on Simone click here. 

Virginia Hall's prison cell in northeastern Spain was something out of a nightmare. Hall imagined the moment in which the Spanish police would hand her over to the Gestapo and their glee at having finally captured "The Limping Lady." Hall knew the Nazis wouldn't risk letting her escape. They'd transfer her to a secret facility, interrogate her, torture her, and kill her. Or sometimes the Nazis kept their prisoners alive and attempted to leverage them against the Allies. Months of psychological torture would give way to more physical punishments. Dousing with freezing water. Electric shocks. Beatings and cutting. This was the way of the Nazis. Virginia's Hall's American nationality was maybe the one thing that could save her. In late 1942, Spain was still considered technically neutral in the war. The Spanish dictator Francisco Franco had offered Hitler Spain's allegiance in return for aid in nation-building. There was a division of Spanish volunteers fighting for the German army, but Spain still remained reluctant and fickle.  Andrew Orr says, "Franco's regime is ideologically complex and people still fight over whether or not it was fascist or just really authoritarian and traditionalist. Regardless of how anyone's individual sees it, the regime was very friendly to Nazi Germany and especially fascist Italy because Italy and Germany had backed Franco in the civil war. So Spain tended politically to like the Axis powers a lot." But Virginia Hall's capture by the Spanish was too big a threat to the British. Hall knew too much, and the Nazis could assume that the British would change battle strategy once the Special Operations Executive, Hall's intelligence agency, discovered she'd been captured. Hall's information would be useless to the Axis Powers, and so she was as good as dead.  This episode contains interviews with:• Andrew Orr: a professor in the Department of History at Kansas State University, a specialist in modern military history, intelligence operations in the Middle East, imperialism, civil-military relations, and the history of French Communist Party identity; author of Women and the French Army• Chris Costa: Executive Director of the International Spy Museum, a 34-year veteran of the Department of Defense, and he served 25 years in the United States Army working in counterintelligence, human intelligence and with special operations forces in Central America, Europe, and the Middle East.• Judith Pearson: expert on Virginia Hall and author of the book The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy• Dr. Ludivine Broch: A scholar of World War II French history and lecturer at the University of Westminster, UK; Editor of Contemporary European History, associate fellow of the Birbeck Institute for the study of Antisemitism; co-founder of the French History Network• Brad Catling: great nephew of Virginia HallLearn more at diversionaudio.com/good-assassins “Good Assassins” is a production of Diversion Audio, in association with iHeartPodcasts. Featuring the voices of Matthew Amendt, Orlagh Cassidy, Raphael Corkhill, Manoel Felciano, Sean Gormley, Mikaela Izquierdo, Lenne Klingaman, Andrew Polk, John Pirkis, Steve Routman.This season is hosted by Stephan Talty and written by C.D. Carpenter. Produced and directed by Kevin Thomsen for Real Jetpacks Productions. Story Editing by Jacob Bronstein with editorial direction from Scott Waxman. Additional research and reporting by Sophie McNulty. Theme music by Tyler Cash. Sound Design, Mixing, and Mastering by Paul Goodrich. Sound Editing by Justin Kilpatrick. Executive Producers: Jacob Bronstein, Mark Francis and Scott Waxman for Diversion Audio. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Virginia Hall joins the UK's spy agency, the Special Operations Executive. The SOE was created to "set Europe ablaze" and wreak havoc on the battlefield: sabotage plus a little espionage, paramilitary operations, make things blow up.After spy training, Virginia heads into the field in Lyon, France, a strategic location for the Allies. They're planting the seeds of a Resistance there and it's a hotspot for Nazi activity. Virginia hooks into the Resistance network but the walls around her begin to push in. The USA, which had remained neutral in the War up to this point, makes broader shows of support for the Allies. And it means Virginia Hall will soon lose her open status—and her cover—as an American newspaper reporter working in France.In her first operation to save a downed British pilot, Virginia has a chilling encounter with Gestapo officers that has fateful consequences for her larger mission.This episode contain interviews with:• Chris Costa: Executive Director of the International Spy Museum, a 34-year veteran of the Department of Defense, and he served 25 years in the United States Army working in counterintelligence, human intelligence and with special operations forces in Central America, Europe, and the Middle East • Judith Pearson: author of The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy, the first biography to tell the story of the amazing Virginia Hall • Brad Catling: great nephew of Virginia Hall • Andrew Orr: a professor in the Department of History at Kansas State University, a specialist in modern military history, intelligence operations in the Middle East, imperialism, civil-military relations, and the history of French Communist Party identity; author of Women and the French ArmyLearn more at diversionaudio.com/good-assassinsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hope rises to a challenge as pilots take to the skies.... It is 1940, and the Battle of Britain takes to the air as Hope Stapleford embarks on her third thrilling adventure.... It is 1940, and, as the Battle of Britain takes to the air, Hope Stapleford is recruited to join the Special Operations Executive. On her way to Scotland, she is pulled from a train and driven to spymaster Fitzroy's stately home. She is his intelligence operative, and he wants to send her to a Scottish airfield where Harvey is already stationed undercover as a mechanic. At the airbase, Hope and Harvey find a community in turmoil. Pilots talk of strange sightings in the air, and local mechanics report mysterious scratches appearing on the wings and fuselage of the aircraft. Is this a case of homegrown sabotage or something more sinister? And why has Cole, an old colleague of Fitzroy's, suddenly appeared? Glowing orbs, grieving mothers and the legacy of dead German pilots are only some of the challenges Hope must face to complete her latest mission.... Hope for Tomorrow - the third edition of the exciting spy thriller Hope Stapleford Mystery series!

Do you want to learn more about SF? Have you been caught up in the whimsical nature of the city of San Francisco? Join us for a conversation w/ author Gary Kamiya & Artist Paul Madonna about the beautiful city of San Francisco & their book the Spirits of San Francisco - Voyages Through the Unknown City. About Gary Kamiya: I was born in Oakland, grew up in Berkeley and have lived in San Francisco since 1971. I received my BA and MA in English literature from UC Berkeley, where I won the Mark Schorer Citation. I was a co-founder and longtime executive editor of the groundbreaking web site Salon.com, where I reported from the Middle East, covered three Olympics, and wrote about politics, pop culture, literature, art, music and sports. Until March 2018 I was the executive editor of San Francisco Magazine, where I wrote award-winning features about the tech-driven transformation of San Francisco, homelessness, the Tenderloin, the injection drug crisis, the waterfront, the new Museum of Modern Art, the controversy over the canonization of Father Junipero Serra, and legalized marijuana, among other subjects. My first book, Shadow Knight: The Secret War Against Hitler, was a critically-acclaimed narrative history of Britain's top-secret Special Operations Executive. My second book, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco, was awarded the 2013 Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction and has sold more than 50,000 copies. My local history column, "Portals of the Past," runs every other Saturday in the San Francisco Chronicle. My work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, ArtForum, Sports Illustrated, Mother Jones, and many other publications and has been widely anthologized, including in The Best African-American Essays 2010, The New Harvard Literary History of the United States, and the Longman Reader. I have been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Ron Ross Founder's Award by the San Francisco History Association and the Presidio Historical Association Award. I have appeared as an expert on-camera source in numerous documentaries, including a forthcoming PBS 4-hour documentary on William Randolph Hearst, Jim Yager and Peter Stein's forthcoming Moving San Francisco (about the past, present and future of transportation in San Francisco) and two of their previous documentaries, the Emmy Award-winningWater from the Wilderness (on Hetch Hetchy) and The People's Palace (on City Hall), Michael House's I Remember Herb Caen, and others. I live on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. About Paul Madonna: Paul Madonna is an award-winning artist and best-selling author whose unique blend of drawing and storytelling has been heralded as an “all new art form.” Paul is the creator of the series All Over Coffee, which ran in the San Francisco Chronicle for twelve years, and the author of five books, including the Emit Hopper Mystery Series. His book Everything is its own reward won the 2011 NCBA Award for best book. Paul's work ranges from novels to cartoons to large-scale public murals and can be found internationally in print as well as in galleries and museums, including the Oakland Museum of California, the William Blake Association in France, and the San Francisco International Airport. Paul was a founding editor for therumpus.net, has taught drawing at the University of San Francisco, and frequently lectures on creative practice. He holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and was the first (ever!) Art Intern at MAD magazine.

Bellasis House, named just Bellasis in WW2, was one of the first six of the training schools of the Special Operations Executive. Established in early 1941, Bellasis first provided paramilitary training for SOE staff and foreign anti-fascist would-be agents. By November 1941 Bellasis had become the Holding School for Czechoslovakian personnel, giving initial and refresher instruction for agents waiting to depart on missions in enemy-occupied Czechoslovakia. The SOE agents for whom Bellasis is chiefly remembered were the two members, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, of OPERATION ANTHROPOID. On the Wednesday show, we shall visit the lovely natural surroundings of the Bellasis House in Surrey, 80 years after the Operation Anthropoid took place.

This week Justin sits down with author and Historian Dr. Kate Vigurs. Kate shares the story of the women hired by Britain's Special Operations Executive, a mysterious organization that operated during World War II to conduct sabotage, reconnaissance, and espionage missions in occupied Europe. These brave women had to prove themselves as strong and worthy of dangerous work to compete with their male colleagues.  From members of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force to women who were heard speaking excellent French at parties, female SOE personnel came from all walks of life. The work of the SOE and the women who joined it ultimately contributed to Allied victory and the fall of the Nazi regime.Connect with Dr. Vigurs:katevigurs.comTwitter: @historical_kateCheck out her book, Mission France, here.https://www.amazon.com/Mission-France-True-History-Women/dp/030020857XConnect with Spycraft 101:Check out Justin's latest release, Covert Arms, here.spycraft101.comIG: @spycraft101Shop: spycraft-101.myshopify.comPatreon: Spycraft 101Find Justin's first book, Spyshots: Volume One, here.Download the free eBook, The Clandestine Operative's Sidearm of Choice, here.Support the showSupport the show

durée : 00:28:57 - Une histoire particulière, un récit documentaire en deux parties - Descendante d'une noble lignée, fille d'un père soufi, Noor Inayat Khan voulait à la fois défendre l'Europe contre Hitler et ne tuer personne en résistant. Arrêtée par la Gestapo, son comportement fut héroïque.

durée : 00:28:37 - Une histoire particulière, un récit documentaire en deux parties - Le SOE offrait aux femmes la même formation qu'aux hommes : les futures espionnes apprenaient à se battre, à tuer, à tromper l'ennemi, à réussir une filature, à utiliser la radio en chiffrant les messages.

What a great conversation with Pat Gehant, competitive tennis player, grandmother, recently retired so she can now focus on her other passion projects. Join us to hear the conversation and learn about her:·       Many talents including photography.·       Journey out of the box was so important.·       Career Principles: know yourself, learn new things, work collaboratively and future oriented focus on new opportunity.·       Career as an IT Director without any certifications!·       Gifts as a visionary, collaborator and networker.·       Career decision based on her 4-year old daughter's concerns.·       Message: ‘I close the time and place for my shift to continue a passion focused life on my terms'.·       Challenge to let go and actually retire to shift to other life passions. Pat offers such vulnerable insight into her passion led career journey and what she has learned along the way. Reclaim your sovereignty over your career with knowledge, creativity and leave the fear of failure at the door. Golden rule of passion driven career- work hard in the current job with an eye towards the future and find the doors and open them. BTW she only applied for 2 jobs in her entire career…..everything else was networking, showcasing her skills and being tapped.  The conversation is important, as so many shifts in the workforce, jobs and roles and responsibilities are evolving which is creating new jobs needing new skills.  Do you have a chance to create your next role? Recommendations from Pat:·       Creative Confidence, Unleashing the creative potential within us, Tom, and David Kelly. We are taught in school to follow the syllabus and chase the grade. When we enter the workplace many times, we are stuck. “Too often, companies and individuals assume that creativity and innovation are the domain of the "creative types." Tom and David Kelly, two of the leading experts in innovation, design, and creativity on the planet show us that each and every one of us is creative.” This book will allow you to understand your creative side and that if you want more success you will have to shrug off more failure. An energizing read at any stage of your career. #1 Know yourself·       Open, The Andre Agassi story, Autobiography. From Andre Agassi, one of the most beloved athletes in history and one of the most gifted men ever to step onto a tennis court, a beautiful, haunting autobiography. This is a story that will captivate both tennis players as well as anyone interested in learning how one can overcome failure on such a public forum and become a beloved and humble citizen of the world. #1 Know yourself·       A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy...Book by Sonia Purnell. In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." The target in their sights was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore socialite who talked her way into Special Operations Executive, the spy organization dubbed Winston Churchill's "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare." She became the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines and--despite her prosthetic leg--helped to light the flame of the French Resistance, revolutionizing secret warfare as we know it. Why read this? Because this book reads like the best of Daniel Silva, John Le Carre, and other, only this is real…all of it! #3 – Work Collaboratively (I know a stretch, but an amazing women we never learned about in school. What a story!)·       Unstoppable" Siggi B. Wilzig's Astonishing Journey from Auschwitz Survivor and Penniless Immigrant to Wall Street Legend" by Joshia M. Greene. Unstoppable is the ultimate immigrant story and an epic David-and-Goliath adventure. While American teens were socializing in ice cream parlors, Siggi was suffering beatings by Nazi hoodlums for being a Jew and was soon deported along with his family to the darkest place the world has ever known: Auschwitz. The story of his perseverance and commitment to faith, family and country is a reminder of the good and the evil that can result from our lack of understanding. #4 – Future Oriented with focus on the new opportunities·       Tournament de Pizza, (Formerly Tour de Pizza) at the Racquet Club of St. Pete that has a menu comprised of specialty 'zas, subs, salads and more with a full liquor bar with 3Daughters on tap., It is the home of the famous pizza diet and Kahwa Coffee! The restaurant is also known for owner Matt McClellan's belief that pizza is healthy food. It's the home of the "30-day pizza diet". Matt is an award-winning body builder who believes tennis is the best cardio workout to a full and healthy lifestyle. So, Matt is not just pizza, Tournament de Pizza is a lifestyle. Located at the Racquet Club of St. Petersburg 170 47th Avenue NE Saint Petersburg, FL 33703 727-898-5555 And tell Matt you heard about it on Shifting Inside Out Podcast! Listen here https://angiemccourt.transistor.fm/episodes

The main sources used for this episode were: Code Name: Lise: The True Story of the Woman Who Became WWII's Most Highly Decorated Spy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odette_Hallowes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Operations_Executive