Betrayals

About the Book

It was Britain’s most humiliating intelligence disaster of World War II. The newly established Special Operations Executive (SOE) dropped fifty-three agents during 1941 and 1942 into the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Their mission was to aid the Dutch underground as part of Winston Churchill’s plan to “set Europe ablaze”. However, Dutch resistance was thoroughly penetrated by German counter-intelligence. In spite of repeated security warnings including one by SOE’s own chief encoder, Leo Marks, agent after agent was parachuted into the waiting arms of the Nazis. Almost all of those captured were executed at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Two were able to escape from captivity and reach London to report the calamity. These two heroic men were promptly arrested as suspected double agents, their tale ignored. In this story, Sgt. Jeff Williamson, a fictitious Canadian agent, goes through SOE training and because of his ability to speak Dutch, is dropped into the Netherlands. He manages to evade German capture and make his way through war-torn, occupied Europe to Spain and Gibraltar only then to be incarcerated in an MI5 (British counter-intelligence) prison and kept there until the Germans’ surrender. During his time in prison and long afterwards he is haunted by his own history and the fate of his fellow agents. He is driven to attempt to find the cause of the intelligence disaster and SOE’s motivation for his own imprisonment.

About the Author

George Hahn was born in Vienna in 1926. After Austria was annexed by the Germans in 1938, he fled, first alone to the Netherlands, where he spent a year in a children’s camp, and finally, after the outbreak of World War II, with his family to the United States. Towards the end of that war and for some time afterwards he was an agent of the US. Counter-Intelligence Corps, working in France and Germany. After his return to the US, he attended the University of California in Berkeley and then Stanford University, where he studied Biophysics. The author was appointed to the faculty of the Stanford School of Medicine in 1966. He has written or co-authored four books and over two hundred articles in the scientific literature. Since retiring, he and his wife have divided their time between Carmel Highlands, California, and Panajachel, Guatemala.