Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Operation CHAMPAGNE: The changing fortunes of Richard Kuehnel, SOE's first German agent during the Second World War

Operation CHAMPAGNE: The changing fortunes of Richard Kuehnel, SOE's first German agent during the Second World War

O'Connor, Bernard

Paperback

World War II

ISBN10: 1447663136
ISBN13: 9781447663133
Publisher: Lulu Pr
Published: Oct 3 2021
Pages: 266
Weight: 0.95
Height: 0.72 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.27
Language: English
In June 1941, Britain's Royal Navy sank a German meteorological observation ship in the Arctic to obtain the codes it used to send messages to German U-Boats. Richard Kuehnel, one of the captured crew, informed his interrogators that he was anti-Nazi, provided them with naval intelligence and volunteered to work against Hitler's regime. Accompanied by a German-speaking 'minder', he was accommodated in the vicarage at Bayford, near Brickendonbury Manor, Hertfordshire, a specialist industrial sabotage school run by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Britain's top-secret clandestine warfare organisation. He was trained and equipped for Operation CHAMPAGNE, a sabotage and subversion mission in Hamburg. In April 1942, he was taken by a British trawler to the Norwegian coast, a small fishing boat was lowered into the sea which he then sailed to Bergen. Although two messages were sent in secret ink, the British never found out what happened to Keuhnel. A message from Norway in November 1942 suggested he had not been able to complete his mission and needed help to return through Sweden and Norway to Britain. As some of the detail contradicted what they knew, SOE were dubious. They thought he was an agent provocateur and instructed their Scandinavian contacts to have nothing to do with him Using primary sources from Kuehnel's personnel and mission files, Operation CHAMPAGNE sheds light not just on the changing fortunes of Britain's first German secret agent but also on the mind-set of intelligence officers working round the clock in their attempts to fight a war against the Nazis. Bernard O'Connor has managed to discover what British Intelligence failed to do in 1945. He has located German sources which shed some light,

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