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in water.’ In early 1944 a report from a Finnish source raised a difficult dilemma for Harry Carr where professional duty cut across personal feelings. The agent told him that the Germans had taken a party of Finnish officers on a tour which had included launching sites for V-1 flying bombs in north-west France and had ‘boasted to them how London would be obliterated by the pilotless machines’. At the time Carr’s mother and sister were living together in a top-floor flat in Norwood, south London, which he realised was right in the line of flight of V-1 bombs heading for central London. Apart from looking after his sister (who was working as an ambulance driver), Carr reckoned his mother ‘had no special reason for remaining in the London area’, but he could not ‘disclose the secret agent’s report to them’. In the end he wrote her a letter ‘saying that I considered she had stuck to London long enough, and suggested that she should go away for a bit’, and stay with relatives in Bournemouth on the south coast. His mother ignored the advice and remained where she was. As Carr had feared, in June 1944 one of the very first ‘doodlebugs’ aimed at London landed near her flat, blew in the dining-room window and caused quite a lot of damage. Fortunately, however, his mother was in another room at the time and his sister was out.

While in April 1942 Bill Cordeaux had complained that there were only four SIS ‘stations’ (here meaning networks) in Norway, in June the following year Broadway sent Stockholm a list of twenty-three Norwegian stations whose members and agents might appear in Sweden seeking assistance. They extended from Kirkenes in the far north, through Tromsö (two stations), Trondheim (three), Bergen (two), to Stavanger, Kristiansund in the north-west and Oslo (four). There was no shortage of patriotic volunteers for these stations and the Norwegian section at Head Office (P.9) established a training school in London at 14 Brompton Square. While the ‘primary objective’ of the Norwegian shore stations was ‘the obtaining of sighting reports of major units of the main German battle fleet’ (especially the battleship Tirpitz), their activities varied significantly according to the personalities of their members and the range of their contacts. Intelligence on German naval movements was collected from direct visual observation as well as from agents recruited locally. This was all backed up with extensive logistical support. Motorised fishing vessels, motor torpedo boats, submarines and aircraft were all used to infiltrate agents. Once ashore each station needed support, for example, in charging accumulators to power their radio sets, as well as couriers to deliver intelligence and warning of German counter-measures, such as arrests, searches and roadblocks. Visual reports on the Tirpitz’s movements, along with Ultra decrypts and photographic air intelligence, locating the ship and its defences in Altafjord, northern Norway, contributed to the planning of a daring midget-submarine attack which in September 1943 disabled the warship for three months.4 For a year from late 1943, the ‘Aquarius’ station in Stavanger had a useful agent in the police headquarters whose command of German led to his being employed in liaison duties with the German military. Thus he was able not only to supply detailed information about the local German forces but also to influence the course of security investigations.

One of SIS’s most successful Norwegian agents was Oluf Reed Olsen, whose report of his second operation, a six-month spell from May 1944 based near the seaport of Kristiansand on the south coast of Norway, gives a flavour of the challenges presented by working in enemy-occupied territory. Olsen and his wireless operator were dropped in by parachute, and the operation (code-named ‘Makir’) began very well. ‘I had an excellent landing’, he wrote, ‘in the middle of a blueberry bush approx. 10 metres from one of the corners of the light triangle’ (set up to mark the landing zone). ‘The reception were on the spot and ready with a cup of warm