The Tangled Web The Shocking and Still Unsolved Story of One of the Greatest Failures of Allied Espionage During World War II

This book is in Very Good condition and has a Very Good- dust jacket. The book is in generally clean condition. There are several small spots of rubbing / discoloration to the front cover. The text pages are generally clean and bright. Both the front and rear endpapers have generalized toning. The dust jacket has fading to the spine of the book and there is a small chip to the bottom spine end, along with some rubbing and wrinkling. "Lauwers, a bespectacled 26-year-old who’d been working on a rubber plantation in Singapore before the war, had been in Holland for four months before then, signaling faithfully and using security checks, as he had been trained. Giskes told Lauwers that he could save his and his fellow agent’s life by acting as if nothing was wrong and transmitting messages to London drafted by the Abwehr. To the Dutchman’s alarm, Giskes asked him what security checks he used, but Lauwers managed to come up with a plausible lie. He went on air confident that SOE would see that the genuine checks were missing and treat his messages with appropriate suspicion. This, unfortunately, was putting more faith in Lauwers’s British masters than they deserved. His signals, when they came in, were flagged "BLUFF CHECK OMITTED, TRUE CHECK OMITTED"—both security checks missing—but this was ignored. It was one of the things Marks had questioned when he joined SOE a few months later, only to be told not to worry. Dutch radio operator Hubertus Lauwers repeatedly tried to signal his British handlers that he’d been captured—but all his efforts were in vain. And while the British didn’t notice the warnings, the Germans did, and replaced him. (The National Archives, UK) That directive wasn’t entirely unjustified: the radio signals at that range were faint, and it was possible that the messages had been mistranscribed. But the main reason Baker Street ignored the red flags was that the controllers chose to. While SOE’s French and Polish sections seemed to have plenty to report, the Dutch section had struggled to recruit agents and get them into the country. It had only three active agents at the start of March 1942. It was preferable to believe they were all safe and starting to get results." (from HistoryNet).…