Search results for ""Author Nigel West""

Tradecraft: as intriguing as it is forbidden . . . Tradecraft is the term applied to techniques used by intelligence personnel to assist them in conducting their operations and, like many other professions, the espionage business has developed its own rich lexicon. In the real, sub rosa world of intelligence-gathering, each bit of jargon acts as a veil of secrecy over particular types of activity, and in this book acclaimed author Nigel West explains and give examples of the lingo in action. He draws on the first-hand experience of defectors to and from the Soviet Union; surveillance operators who kept terrorist suspects under observation in Northern Ireland; case officers who have put their lives at risk by pitching a target in a denied territory; the NOCs who lived under alias to spy abroad; and much more. Turn these pages and be immersed in the real world of James Bond: assets, black operations, double agents, triple agents ... it’s all here.

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In 1933 the Admiralty banned ‘Blinker’ Hall from publishing his autobiography, but here, for the first time, those chapters that survived are presented in full. See what the renowned spymaster had to say about the British Naval Intelligence – the pinnacle of the world’s secret intelligence services. He explores the function of secret intelligence in wartime, censorship, subterfuge, the significance of Churchill in the Dardanelles campaign, the Zimmermann Telegram, the USA’s entry to the First World War and more. With supporting text and images by Philip Vickers and a foreword by expert author Nigel West, A Clear Case of Genius provides a unique insight into the thinking of one of Britain’s pioneering intelligence leaders.

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First published on the 15th anniversary of the Falklands War in 1982, THE SECRET WAR FOR THE FALKLANDS is nothing less than the secret history of the conflict, the first time the Royal Navy had been engaged by an enemy since 1945. In terms of hardware it was a test of the world's latest air and defence systems and a unique opportunity to push competing fighters to their limits in an environment that stretched men and aircraft alike. This book focuses on OPERATION CORPORATE, the task force assigned to retake the Falklands, and on the clandestine efforts to deny General Galtieri the one weapon that could have turned Corporate into a humilating defeat for Britain - the French-manufactured Exocet missile.

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As part of the infamous Double Cross operation, Jewish double agent Renato Levi proved to be one of the Allies' most devastating weapons in the Second World War. ln 1941, with the help of Ml6, Levi built an extensive spy ring in North Africa and the Middle East. But, most remarkably, it was entirely fictitious. This network of imagined informants peddled dangerously false information to Levi's unwitting German handlers. His efforts would distort any enemy estimates of Allied battle plans for the remainder of the war. His communications were infused with just enough truth to be palatable, and just enough imagination to make them irresistible. ln a vacuum of seemingly trustworthy sources, Levi's enemies not only believed in the CHEESE network, as it was codenamed, but they came to depend upon it. And, by the war's conclusion, he could boast of having helped the Allies thwart Rommel in North Africa, as well as diverting whole armies from the D-Day landing sites. He wielded great influence and, as a double agent, he was unrivalled. Until now, Levi's devilish deceptions and feats of derring-do have remained completely hidden. Using recently declassified files, Double Cross in Cairo uncovers the heroic exploits of one of the Second World War's most closely guarded secrets.

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On Monday, 4 March 2019, Sergei Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia collapsed in the centre of Salisbury in Wiltshire. Both were suffering the effects of A-234, a third-generation Russian-manufactured military grade Novichok nerve agent. As three suspects, all GRU officers, were quickly identified, it was also established that the door handle to the Skripals' suburban home had been contaminated with the toxin. Whilst the Skripals had lived in the cathedral city for the past seven years, what Sergei's neighbours did not know was that he had once been a colonel in the Russian Federation's military intelligence service. Back in July 1996, he had been posted under diplomatic cover to Madrid where he was subsequently cultivated by Pablo Miller, an MI6 officer operating as a businessman under the alias Antonio Alvares de Idalgo. Sergei's recruitment by Miller was one of many successes achieved by Western agencies following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. These counter-intelligence triumphs had their origins in a joint FBI/CIA project codenamed COURTSHIP which was based on the rather risky tactic of making an approach to almost any identified KGB or GRU officer, in almost any environment - a technique known as a 'cold pitch'. It soon yielded results; within five years COURTSHIP had netted about twenty assets. Codenamed FORTHWITH, Sergei was betrayed in December 2001\. Arrested in 2004, he was convicted of high treason in Russia, but was subsequently included in a prisoner swap in July 2010 and brought to the UK. The journey to the attempt on his life had begun. The Vienna spy swap was the culmination of a CIA plan to free a specific individual, Gennadi Vasilenko, who had been the Agency's key mole inside the KGB since March 1979\. To acquire the necessary leverage, the FBI swooped on a large network in the United States, bringing to an end a surveillance operation, codenamed GHOST STORIES, that lasted ten years. Anxious to avoid further embarrassment over the arrests, Vladimir Putin personally authorised an exchange, unaware of Vasilenko's true status. It was only after the transaction had been completed, and two further Russian spies were exfiltrated from Moscow, that the Kremlin learned of Vasilenko's value, and the scale of the deception. For the very first time, a Russian government had been persuaded to release four traitors and send them to the West. The humiliation was complete. As _Spy Swap_ reveals, Putin's retribution would manifest itself in a quiet Wiltshire market town.

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The Cold War, with its air of mutual fear and distrust and the shadowy world of spies and secret agents, gave publishers the chance to produce countless stories of espionage, treachery and deception. What Nigel West has discovered is that the most egregious deceptions were in fact the stories themselves. In this remarkable investigation into the claims of many who portrayed themselves as key players in clandestine operations, the author has exposed a catalogue of misrepresentations and falsehoods. Did Greville Wynne really exfiltrate a GRU defector from Odessa? Was the frogman Buster Crabb abducted during a mission in Portsmouth Harbour? Did the KGB run a close-guarded training facility, as described by J. Bernard Hutton in School for Spies, which was modelled on a typical town in the American mid-west, so agents could be acclimatised to a non-Soviet environment? With the help of witnesses with first-hand experience, and recently declassified documents, Nigel West answers these and other fascinating questions from a time when secrecy and suspicion allowed the truth to be concealed.

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Black Ops is a thrilling compendium of undercover warfare from around the world. Here you will meet the most hardened soldiers and operatives facing extraordinary dangers deep behind enemy lines. The book features many amazing stories from World War II, such as the assassination of Holocaust architect Reinhard Heydrich by Britain's Special Operations Executive, which in 1940 received its mission from Churchill to 'set Europe ablaze' in the battle against Nazi tyranny. Also told are the stories of Stalin's favourite spy; the little-known account of how Japanese military codes were cracked; and Operation Mincemeat, which led to the invasion of Sicily. Written by a leading military intelligence expert, Black Ops ranges across a century of remarkable clandestine operations. Starting with Hans Carl Lody, the first German spy during World War I, we also have the plot to assassinate Lenin; the origins of strategic deception; and the Cold War defection of Oleg Gordievsky from the Soviet Union. The book is brought right up to date with the plot to assassinate Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALS in 2011, and the attempted assassination of the Skripals in the UK in 2018, leading to fears that the world is on the brink of a new Cold War. A compelling anthology of spies, soldiers, mercenaries and assassins, Black Ops tells the secret history of 20th- and 21st-century warfare.

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This is the story of the most enthralling and significant post-war intelligence revelations as told by Britain's most authoritative writer on espionage and the secret services.

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MI5 is arguably the most secret and misunderstood of all the British government departments. Its enigmatic title - much more than its proper name, the Security Service - stands in the public mind for the dark world of the secret services in general. In reality it has a very specific brief: counter-intelligence. Its object is to combat espionage and subversion directed against the UK. Nigel West's book traces the history of MI5 clearly and accurately from its modest beginnings in 1909 until 1945, with the main part of the book focussing upon the important role which MI5 played in the Second World War. This includes the story of the sixteen enemy agents who were rounded up in Britain who were either hanged or shot; the manipulation of the Axis espionage networks by the use of turned' Abwehr agents (the famous Double Cross System), and the all-important check on its success provided by the intercepted German signals so brilliantly decoded at Bletchley; and the various deceptions practised on the German High Command. The book, which is laced with true anecdotes as bizarre and compulsively readable as any novel, is the fruit of years of painstaking research in the course of which Nigel West has traced and interviewed more than a hundred people who figure prominently in the story: German and Soviet agents, counter-intelligence officers and, most remarkably, more than a dozen of the double agents. In this new and revised edition, Nigel West details the organisational charts which show the structure of the wartime security apparatus, in what is regarded as the most accurate and informative account ever written of MI5 before and during the Second World War.

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Modern historians have consistently condemned the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence service, and its SS equivalent, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), as incompetent and even corrupt organizations. However, newly declassified MI5, CIA and US Counterintelligence Corps files shed a very different light on the structure, control and capabilities of the German intelligence machine in Europe, South America, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. It is usually stated that, under Admiral Canaris, the Abwehr neglected its main functions, its attention being focused more on trying to bring down Hitler. Yet Canaris greatly expanded the Abwehr from 150 personnel into a vast world-wide organisation which achieved many notable successes against the Allies. Equally, the SD's tentacles spread across the Occupied territories as the German forces invaded country after country across Europe. In this in-depth study of the Abwehr's rise to power, 1935 to 1943, its activities in Russia, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Japan, China, Manchuko and Mongolia are examined, as well as those in Thailand, French Indo-China, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, and the Arab nations. In this period, the Abwehr built a complex network of individual agents with transmitters operating from commercial, diplomatic and consular premises. Before, and in the early stages of the war, it later became apparent, the Abwehr was controlling a number of agents in Britain. Indeed, it was only after the war that the scale of the Abwehr's activities became known, the organisation having of around 20,000 members. For the first time, the Abwehr's development and the true extent of its operations have been laid bare, through official files and even of restored documents previously redacted. The long list of operations and activities of the Abwehr around the world includes the efforts of an agent in the USA who was arrested after a bizarre attempt to obtain a quantity of blank American passports by impersonating a senior State Department official, Edward Weston, an Under-Secretary of State. Also, former U.S. Marine, Kurt Jahnke, who was recruited to collect information about the American munitions production and send it on to Germany. These are just two of the numerous and absorbing accounts in this all-embracing study.

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As the Second World War progressed and defeat for Hitler's Third Reich in all theatres became ever more certain, the tight Abwehr network, built so effectively by its head, Admiral Canaris, began to unravel. High-level defections to the Allies and bitter disputes with the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) added to a collapse in morale. Most notably was the increasing opposition within the officer ranks of the Army to Hitler fermented by Canaris and his deputy Generalmajor Hans Oster. The final years of the Abwehr were marked by the Abwehr's efforts to undermine the regime, which came to a bloody conclusion following the Valkyrie assassination attempt of 20 July 1944. This saw the arrest of many Abwehr officials and the execution of Canaris and Oster. In this penetrating study of the final years of the Abwehr, Nigel West, a world-renowned specialist in the field, pieces together the gradual decline in the organisation's role and importance with Hitler and his acolytes paying little heed to reports that were increasingly cautionary. Among the many previously undisclosed stories are details gleaned from recently opened files which tell of a hitherto unknown spy-swap. This was the exchange of Berthold Shulze-Holthus, a German spy detained in Iran, for Ferdinand Rodriguez, a British radio operator captured in France. This was the only such exchange that took place during the whole of the Second World War - though the fact that the swap took place at all suggests that a previously unsuspected degree of communication existed between the Allies and Nazi Germany. Perhaps most tantalizingly of all, is the new night light thrown upon the role the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, had, in league with the Abwehr, in the Valkyrie bombing which almost killed Hitler.

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The Second World War saw the role of espionage, secret agents and spy services increase exponentially as the world was thrown into a conflict unlike any that had gone before it.At this time, no one in government was really aware of what MI5 and its brethren did. But with Churchill at the country’s helm, it was decided to let him in on the secret, providing him with a weekly report of the spy activities. These reports were so classified that he was handed each report personally and copies were never allowed to be made, nor was he allowed to keep hold of them. Even now, the documents only exist as physical copies deep in the archives, many pages annotated by hand by ‘W.S.C.’ himself.In Churchill’s Spy Files intelligence expert Nigel West unravels the tales of hitherto unknown spy missions, using this groundbreaking research to paint a fresh picture of the worldwide intelligence scene of the Second World War.

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Written by the renowned expert Nigel West, this book exposes the operations of Britain's overseas intelligence-gathering organisation, the famed Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and traces its origins back to its inception in 1909. In this meticulously researched account, its activities and structure are described in detail, using original secret service documents. The main body of the book concerns MI6's operations during the Second World War, and includes some remarkable successes and failures, including how MI6 financed a glamorous confidant of the German secret service; how a suspected French traitor was murdered by mistake; how Franco's military advisors were bribed to keep Spain out of the war; how members of the Swedish secret police were blackmailed into helping the British war effort; how a sabotage operation in neutral Tangiers enabled the Allied landings in North Africa to proceed undetected; and how Britain's generals ignored the first ULTRA decrypts because MI6 said that the information had come from a well-placed source called BONIFACE'. In this new edition, operations undertaken by almost all of MI6's overseas stations are recounted in extraordinary detail. They will fascinate both the professional intelligence officer and the general reader. The book includes organisational charts to illustrate MI6's internal structure and its wartime network of overseas stations. Backed by numerous interviews with intelligence officers and their agents, this engaging inside story throws light on many wartime incidents that had previously remained unexplained.

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This book provides a unique step-by-step guide to the law and practice of the SDT, from the issue of proceedings through to appeal. Its practical approach will help anyone who wishes to avoid the common pitfalls faced by unfamiliar users of the Tribunal.

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It was inevitable that the Allies would invade France in the summer of 1944: the Nazis just had to figure out where and when. This job fell to the Abwehr and several other German intelligence services. Between them they put over 30,000 personnel to work studying British and American signals traffic, and achieved considerable success in intercepting and decrypting enemy messages. They also sent agents to England – but they weren’t to know that none of them would be successful.Until now, the Nazi intelligence community has been disparaged by historians as incompetent and corrupt, but newly released declassified documents suggest this wasn’t the case – and that they had a highly sophisticated system that concentrated on the threat of an Allied invasion. Written by acclaimed espionage historian Nigel West, Codeword Overlord is a vital reassessment of Axis behaviour in one of the most dramatic episodes of the twentieth century.

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In the years immediately following World War II, information was disclosed about what has been termed the shadow war of the existence of hitherto secret agencies. In Germany it was the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst; in Britain it was MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and Special Operations Executive (SOE); in the United States it was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Special Intelligence Service (SIS) of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); in Japan it was the Kempet'ai; and in Italy the Servicio di Informazione Militare (SIM). Sixty years after World War II secrets are still being revealed about the covert activities that took place. Many countries had secret agencies maintaining covert operations, but even ostensibly neutral countries also conducted secret operations. Changes in American, British, and even Soviet official attitudes to declassification in the 1980s allowed thousands of secret documents to be made available for public examination, and the result was extensive revisionism of the conventional histories of the conflict, which previously had excluded references to secret intelligence sources. The Historical Dictionary of World War II Intelligence tells the emerging history of the intelligence world during World War II. This is done through a chronology, an introduction, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on the secret agencies, operations, and events. The world of double agents, spies, and moles during WWII is explained in the most comprehensive reference currently available.

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It was inevitable that the Allies would invade France in the summer of 1944: the Nazis just had to figure out where and when. This job fell to the Abwehr and several other German intelligence services. Between them they put over 30,000 personnel to work studying British and American signals traffic, and achieved considerable success in intercepting and decrypting enemy messages. They also sent agents to England – but they weren’t to know that none of them would be successful.Until now, the Nazi intelligence community has been disparaged by historians as incompetent and corrupt, but newly released declassified documents suggest this wasn’t the case – and that they had a highly sophisticated system that concentrated on the threat of an Allied invasion. Written by acclaimed espionage historian Nigel West, Codeword Overlord is a vital reassessment of Axis behaviour in one of the most dramatic episodes of the twentieth century.

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Signal intelligence is the most secret, and most misunderstood, weapon in the modern espionage arsenal. As a reliable source of information, it is unequalled, which is why Government Communications Headquarters, almost universally known as GCHQ, is several times larger than the two smaller, but more familiar, organisations, MI5 and MI6. Because of its extreme sensitivity, and the ease with which its methods can be compromised, GCHQ's activities remain cloaked in secrecy. In GCHQ: The Secret Wireless War, the renowned expert Nigel West traces GCHQ's origins back to the early days of wireless and gives a detailed account of its development since that time. From the moment that Marconi succeeded in transmitting a radio signal across the Channel, Britain has been engaged in a secret wireless war, first against the Kaiser, then Hitler and the Soviet Union. Following painstaking research, Nigel West is able to describe all GCHQ's disciplines, including direction-finding, interception and traffic analysis, and code-breaking. Also explained is the work of several lesser known units such as the wartime Special Wireless Groups and the top-secret Radio Security Service. Laced with some truly remarkable anecdotes, this edition of this important book will intrigue historians, intelligence professionals and general readers alike.

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Spies have made an extraordinary impact on the history of the 20th Century, but fourteen in particular can be said to have been demonstrably important. As one might expect, few are household names, and it is only with the benefit of recently declassified files that we can now fully appreciate the nature of their contribution. The criteria for selection have been the degree to which each can now be seen to have had a very definite influence on a specific course of events, either directly, by passing vital classified material, or indirectly, by organizing or managing a group of spies. Those selected were active in the First World War, the inter-war period, the Second World War, the Cold War and even the post-Cold War era. These include Walther Dew who formed a spy ring in German-occupied Belgium during the First World War. This train-watching network, known as White Lady', reported on German troop deployments and possible weaknesses in the German defences. Extending its operations into northern France, the ring provided 75 per cent of the information received by GHQ, British Expeditionary Force. By the time of the Armistice in 1918, Dew 's group had a staggering 1,300 members. Olga Gray, the 27-year-old daughter of a Daily Mail journalist, was employed as a secretary by the Communist Party of Great Britain. In 1931 she undertook a mission for MI5 to penetrate the organization and discover its secret channel of communication with Moscow. Gray learned that the Party's cipher was based on Treasure Island and this breakthrough enabled the Party's messages to be read by Whitehall cryptographers. Renato Levi, an Italian playboy, was the longest-serving British agent of the Second World War and is credited with creating the concept of strategic deception. While operating in Cairo as a double agent working for the Abwehr and the British he was instrumental in misleading the Axis about Allied strength across the Middle East and helped Montgomery achieve his victory over Rommel's Afrika Korps at El Alamein. So successful was Levi in this and other deceptions, he was employed to persuade the Germans that the D-Day landings in Normandy were a diversionary feint, in anticipation of an invasion in the Pas-de-Calais. These, and other surprising stories, are revealed in this fascinating insight into a secret world inhabited by mysterious and shadowy characters, all of whom, though larger than life, really did exist.

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SOE’s Belgian and Dutch operations in the Second World War have always been considered highly controversial because of the notorious Englandspiel (‘the English game’) run by the Germans, which effectively took control of the entire resistance organisation in Holland. Skilfully manipulated by Colonel Hermann Giskes, the occupying force arrested dozens of Dutch agents and operated their wireless sets with sufficient finesse to persuade SOE’s headquarters in London that their networks were operating without interference. In reality, each consignment of agents and equipment fell directly into the hands of the Nazis. Was there a traitor in London? Was it incompetence in the field or hopelessly inadequate security procedures? The Belgian experience, equally complicated, was for a time almost as disastrous as the Dutch. Opinions have differed, but here the official records are opened for independent scrutiny by an acknowledged specialist in SOE’s operations. The story that emerges is a harrowing catalogue of Whitehall jealousies and infighting, blunders and ineptitude, combined with breathtaking bravery on the part of the agents who were captured.

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When Betty Farmer married double agent Eddie Chapman, Agent Zigzag, she knew her life would never be ordinary. Yet even before her marriage to Eddie, her life involved incendiary bombs, serial killers, film roles and love affairs with flying aces. After her marriage she coped with Eddie’s mistresses, his criminal activities, separations and personal traumas. Coming from humble origins, Betty would, in time, own a beauty business, a health farm and a castle in Ireland, become the friend and confidante of film stars and an African president, and the honoured guest of Middle Eastern royalty. In an age where women were still very much second-class, she became a perfect example of what, in spite of everything, was possible. Much has been written about Eddie Chapman, films have been made, television programmes produced. Yet alongside Eddie for most of his extraordinary life was an equally extraordinary woman: Mrs Zigzag. This book tells the story of the Chapmans’ often fraught but ultimately loving relationship for the first time.

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This book is a comprehensive and user-friendly guide to the regulations governing the conduct of solicitors. The 2022 edition has been updated to take account of all the key regulatory developments which have taken place since the publication of the 2019 edition.

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