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contribution was made by Michel Hollard and his ‘Agir’ network. Hollard, sales representative for a company that made gas generators for motor cars (a job which allowed him to travel all over France), offered his services to the British assistant military attaché in Berne in January 1942. He was at first rejected, but the report he left, on the French motor and aero industries, was graded so highly that, when he turned up again in May, SIS recruited him at once. Hollard built up a network, including many railway workers, and began by reporting on economic matters and German order of battle in France. In August 1943, however, one of his agents drew his attention to a site near Rouen where the Germans were imposing unusually precise specifications on the French building contractors. Masquerading as a labourer, Hollard investigated for himself and found mysterious ‘miniature runways’ being constructed which were all carefully aligned on bearings pointing towards London. The Berne station was not particularly impressed by the information, but when it was sent on to London it was realised that they were launching-ramps for the V-1 flying bomb. Hollard was instructed forthwith to concentrate exclusively on locating other such sites, which he and his colleagues did with extraordinary success.

By October 1943 Agir had located over a hundred V-1 sites, and Hollard, who had ‘an arrangement’ with the Chef de Gare at Rouen, was able to measure and take a series of photographs of a railway truck-load of V-1s. In addition, he stole an architect’s blueprint of a V-1 site which allowed London to construct an exact scale model which, complemented with photo-reconnaissance, enabled the RAF to carry out effective bombing of the sites (which Agir in turn reported on). One of Hollard’s sub-agents, ‘Z.187’, was an eighteen-year-old Frenchman who came to the British mission in Berne hoping to go on to England to join the Free French forces. When told that this was not possible he offered to work as an agent. SIS arranged for him to be taken on by Swiss Military Intelligence (which facilitated crossing and recrossing the frontier) and simultaneously join the Agir organisation. He helped identify V-1 sites and pinpointed the first V-2 launching site at Watten, near Calais. He also regularly supplied conventional military intelligence, among which was a German General Staff map showing the deployment of an infantry division in the Pas de Calais region – alleged to have been specially prepared for an inspection tour by Hitler – in ‘complete detail down to platoon formations, with all the defence works drawn in, including underwater anti-tank and anti-personnel obstacles along the shore’. Z.187 was caught in June 1944 and never heard of again, presumed shot by the Gestapo. Hollard was more fortunate. Having crossed the Swiss frontier ninety-eight times before being betrayed and arrested in February 1944, he survived the war.17

SIS and D-Day

Operation Overlord, the successful invasion of France on 6 June 1944, in which some 150,000 troops were landed at a cost of little over 5,000 casualties, was a stunning achievement in terms of Allied and inter-service co-operation, careful planning, logistics, timing and, not least, the courage of the individual soldiers, sailors and airmen involved. It was also a tremendous intelligence success. Indeed, no previous military operation in history had been so well supported and sustained by the intelligence available for the assault and its range and quality were a testament to the combined efforts of many agencies: signals intelligence from Bletchley Park; aerial reconnaissance from the RAF; deception operations run by the XX Committee; and detailed surveys of the beaches themselves obtained by COPPs (Combined Operations Pilotage Parties), sometimes lying offshore for days in midget submarines measuring tidal currents and beach gradients and taking sand samples.18 But there were limitations to what could be done. Signals intelligence, for example, which was so valuable where the enemy used wireless, could provide