Chapter 2

Nazi-Occupied Netherlands, May 1944

Het ongeluk was how the work of the Dutch section of the SOE was described around Baker Street.

Het ongeluk – the disaster.

In fact by late 1943, some senior officers in the Special Operations Executive were of the view that to describe N Section as a disaster was a serious understatement. It was less a disaster, more like a catastrophe.

De catastrophe.

And they had good reason for forming this opinion. Over an eighteen-month period, the SOE network in the Netherlands had been so thoroughly penetrated that every agent parachuted into the country – more than fifty of them – had been captured. By late 1943, operations there had been suspended.

It took the SOE until the spring of 1944 to work out the extent to which its activities in the Netherlands had been compromised. They realised that the Germans had discovered all the British codes and ciphers, and that N Section radio operators in London had inexplicably failed to pick up a series of secret security checks in the radio transmissions of captured agents.

But by April 1944, the SOE was satisfied that matters had been rectified and they could once again resume operations in the Netherlands. They were still wary, though, so much so that SOE headquarters decided to send in an agent of which N Section was unaware.

They’d found Peter Dean by chance. When he’d tried to enlist in the Royal Navy, he’d mentioned in passing to a recruiting officer that he was born in the Netherlands and spoke fluent Dutch. His details ended up with MI6, who passed them on to the SOE – though fortunately not its Dutch section.

Peter Dean’s Dutch name was Pieter de Vries. He was originally from Rotterdam but had lived in England since his family had emigrated when he was ten. Despite his age – he was now fifty-one – he turned out to be good agent material: an intelligent man, physically fit and he passed all the rigorous security checks. They decided he should use his original name and place of birth: Rotterdam had been so badly bombed that they were able to give him a home address in a street that no longer existed.

Pieter de Vries travelled across the North Sea by trawler to a rendezvous point just north of the West Frisian Islands, where he transferred to a Dutch trawler that took him on to the port of Harlingen, from where a trusted resistance cell transported him to Enschede in the south of the country, close to the German border.

There was a resistance cell in the city that had survived because London had managed to suspend its activities just in time. Now they wanted to revive it and gather what intelligence they could from the area. Pieter de Vries arrived in Enschede with instructions to meet up with the leader of the group, who went by the code name Julius.

Julius turned out to be Frieda Mooren, a resourceful woman in her early twenties, and for a few weeks the group flourished. They amassed intelligence from across the border on all the transport links in the area, and particularly on the airfield, which was a target for the RAF.