Top Secret

The SOE (Special Operations Executive) designed and built a whole range of gadgets for their secret agents to use to carry out their assignments.

They made tiny cameras and hid them inside cigarette lighters, buttons, pipes, pens, golf balls, and hairbrushes.

The SOE designed shaving cream cannisters and toothbrush

tubes with hidden compart­ments. Agents could safely hide secret messages or other objects in what looked like ordinary bathroom supplies.

Agents carried edible note­paper made out of rice paper. If an agent got caught by enemy forces, he could eat top secret information.

This was a fascinating book to write because I found out so much interesting stuff that I hadn't known before. The agents recruited by the SOE were sometimes quite ordinary people, but they ended up doing extraordinary things. They faced real danger all the time.

The   publishers    asked   me   to

include a profile of one of the female agents in the SOE. In the end I chose Violette Szabo, but there were many other female agents. One of them was Nancy Wake, born in Wellington in 1912, and nicknamed The White Mouse by the Gestapo because of the way she always managed to escape.

• Watch a James Bond movie and invent your own amazing spy device.

• What      is      the     connection

between James Bond and the SOE? (Hint: who was the author of the James Bond stories, and what did he do in the war?)

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Gilt Edge Publishing - Teaching Notes
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Reader's Activity Links

Find out more about the Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.) Who were they? What did they do? How were they trained?
BBC: World wars in depth: The Special Operations Executive 1940 - 1946

Find out more about
Nancy Wake.