Word: deuxi
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Code & Confederates. In London during the early summer of 1940, Gilbert Renault, onetime businessman and would-be movie producer, found the Deuxième Bureau (Intelligence Section) of General de Gaulle's forces represented by one young officer in a cubbyhole. He asked for a mission in France not because he knew anything about intelligence work but because he wanted to see his family again...
...that Vichy was not simply Pétain, Darlan and Laval. They got the headlines, but "at all times [were] more than counterbalanced" by other Vichyites, mostly nameless, who were loyal Frenchmen at the least, and at most, zealously pro-Ally. Example: as early as spring 1941 the Deuxième Bureau (intelligence service) secretly agreed to send military reports to the U.S. Army in Washington, right under Vichy Ambassador Henry-Haye's nose. According to U.S. diplomats at Vichy, French officialdom was 85% on the Allied side...
...Gaulle resigned last January, it was a foregone conclusion that "Colonel Passy" would not last long. Communists, seeing in him a determined enemy, had attacked him ever since liberation. The Socialists had followed suit. Nor was any love lost on the "boy wonder" by the Army, whose stuffy "Deuxième Bureau" was eclipsed by Dewavrin's secret service...
...Organization. The Allies, in espionage as in war, floundered along in traditional forms: spying was essentially military, to be practised by professionals. Unfortunately they had to cope with an enemy which, having revolutionized warfare, revolutionized espionage too. While France's time-honored Deuxième Bureau hopefully trained its second-string Mata Haris, and while Prime Ministers Chamberlain and Baldwin blandly ignored as "exaggerated" (substitute Hitler's "improbable") the catastrophic findings of Britain's brilliant 64, the Germans set in motion "the greatest espionage organization that had ever existed." Typically, Goebbels compiled a blacklist...