Denis Rigden

This remarkable book is a collection of the surviving lecture notes from the training of Special Operations Executive agents during the second world war. It was published by the official UK government publisher and it is amazing that this ever happened given that it is effectively a how to manual for covert operations (although I doubt we'd need to worry overly about someone who actually read this and then tried to do it themselves without extensive practice).

The revelation in the late 1990s that the British had seriously considered assassinating Hitler was a journalistic bombshell. Very quickly, the National Archives (then the Public Records Office) published the entire Operation Foxley dossier with an introduction by Mark Seaman. Denis Rigden’s book, written one year later, unfortunately, has little to add to that story — and is padded out with much extraneous information after running out of things to say about Foxley. Do we really need to show more know how well or how poorly the young Hitler performed in school? Or that he was lucky to have wound up with the name ‘Hitler’ rather than Schicklgruber, which the author finds amusing. The one truly interesting revelation — for this writer, at least — was the close cooperation between Section X, which was the part of the Special Operations Executive which dealt with Germany, and the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF). Surely there’s a book there waiting to be written. show less