The Secret War: MI6, SOE, Abwehr, SD and the Gestapo

The war was fought with guns. It was also fought with secrets.

MI6 ran its networks. The SOE sent men and women to blow up trains and power stations. The Abwehr tried to plant spies in Britain. The SD and Gestapo hunted them all.

Hardy Amies was known as a tailor. In the war he built assassination teams for the SOE. His killers moved in the night. German officers who thought themselves safe did not wake. No medals. No parades. Just silence.

Hardy Amies - SOE

The Abwehr trained men to cross the Channel. They came in rubber boats, or dropped from the air. Radios in their packs. Forged papers in their coats. Every one of them failed. MI5 had already prepared. The double-cross system. Those men ended in cells. Some talked. Some hanged. The German spy network in Britain never stood a chance.

The SD and Gestapo played their own game. Torture rooms in Paris, Lyon, Warsaw. Resistance fighters dragged in and broken. Safe houses betrayed. Radio codes cracked. Yet still the messages got through. Still parachutes fell into dark fields. The SOE lived on improvisation. The Gestapo lived on fear.

This was the other war. The war of interrogations, betrayals, assassinations. The war with no front lines.

It is also the world behind my novel The Flights of the Eagles. A story of spies, informers, and double agents. If you want to know how the hidden war felt — the smoke, the whispers, the choices — subscribe now and be the first to read it.

The hidden war was fought with lies, with fear, with silence. It is the world I tell in The Flights of the Eagles.

👉 Go to the page. Subscribe now. Be the first to step inside the war behind the war.