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tea.’ A few days later, Olsen, who was carrying his wireless set, found himself alone in a railway compartment with a German SS officer, who ‘became extremely interested in the bag containing the radio set and kept on staring at it’. Olsen managed to move to the next carriage, but mildly observed in his report that ‘it would be a great help if the radio sets could be packed into an ordinary leather bag with a good lock on it’. A camp was set up on a forested hillside near the fjord entrance to Kristiansand from where shipping movements could be monitored. A contact in the harbour police recruited two German sailors who had been planning to desert and who had sought his assistance in escaping to England. They ‘were keen to join and fight for the side which they thought right’, but the Norwegians persuaded them that they could best serve by staying on and collecting military information. ‘This they agreed to do, and all seemed so easy that we were almost wary of a Gestapo trap.’ Olsen told them ‘that if anything went wrong, they would be given a safe passage to Sweden’ but, ‘on the other hand, if they double-crossed us, their death warrant could be considered signed’.

Apart from reporting shipping movements and providing daily weather reports, the Makir station had also to report on U-boat activity along the adjacent coast, as well as German order of battle in the area. Olsen, who was careful about security, described the routine as follows:

The main contacts in the town collected reports from their respective sources and placed them in the post-box: twice a week the post-box in town was emptied by the man who was responsible for sending food to the camp, and the reports which had thus been collected were sent with the food courier twice a week. There were always two on this job as it was necessary for one man to go ahead empty-handed in case of bumping into a control. In this way four men were constantly employed on this part of the work. Every fourteenth day the timing was put forward one day to avoid regular traffic. The couriers met each other at pre-arranged places in the forest and at each meeting the place was changed again for the next time.

The men’s tents were ‘well camouflaged from the air and ground, which proved itself when the owner of the property, together with 2 berry-pickers, passed not more than four yards from the main tent without discovering the camp’. Silence was the rule; boots were forbidden; ‘and gym-shoes were worn whether it was wet or dry’. They also ‘had considerable trouble’ from one colleague ‘being prone to snoring, but the person concerned soon became used to being woken up 10 times a night’. At its peak, too, the station transmitted up to ten messages a day, and had to relocate more than once in order to evade German direction-finding units.5

The Low Countries

The Netherlands and Belgium together posed particular problems for British intelligence operations. Both were densely populated small countries, which made it extremely hard to find suitably remote locations for air dropping zones. Furthermore, as they both lay under the Allied bomber route to the German industrial heartland of the Ruhr, anti-aircraft defences were especially concentrated and made it exceptionally difficult for aircraft to grope around at low level trying to distinguish the faint lights of a reception committee. While both were geographically well placed for sea operations from Britain, the enemy in consequence specially built up maritime defences and security measures so that this method soon became prohibitive. The military importance of the two countries to the Axis also meant that a high priority was given to them by the German security services, and although the Sicherheitsdienst and the Abwehr were often at each other’s throats, their efforts constituted a very serious threat to SIS, which was compounded by the disasters suffered by SOE in both Belgium and the Netherlands.

By the autumn of 1942 German successes in Belgium had resulted in a situation when, as an official SOE history put it, the agency