AFCEA London Chapter - Secrets, Silk & Cyanide - Maj Gen (rtd) Bill Robins - RAF Club
The AFCEA London Chapter will be marking its 70th Anniversary year in 2024. In 1954, the UK was still rebuilding after WWII; the Korean War had only just ended; conscription for National Service was in place; there was still some food rationing and we were in the early years of the Cold War.
Our 11th January 2024 meeting will be held in the Battle of Britain Suite in the RAF Club, when our guest speaker will be Maj Gen (Retd) Bill Robins. His talk, Secrets, Silk and Cyanide, will cover the clandestine agencies hosted in many of the great houses around Buckinghamshire during the Second World War. It will summarise the work of eleven of them and then focus on the Special Operations Executive (SOE), its wireless stations at Poundon and Grendon Underwood and their role in communicating with agents and resistance movements in Europe.
The talk will outline the vital role of the women of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) and will cover SOE’s frequently toxic relationship with its sister agency, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
The talk highlights the primacy of HF radio and manual cryptography to support this work, and the mistakes which led to the tragic fate of both the French Prosper network and the Dutch network. It outlines the work of some of the FANY agents operating undercover in France: the gentle wireless operator Noor Inayat Khan, the feisty Violette Szabo and the redoubtable Odette Churchill.
You will learn of the work by the young SOE Codemaster, Leo Marks, and of another FANY, the combat leader Pearl Witherington and her 2000 maquisards, as they battled to delay the German armour trying to get to the Normandy beaches to defeat the allied landings.
Finally, the talk will outline two opposing views of the morality of these subversive and pitiless operations.
Registrations are open and the closing date for bookings will be Friday 5th January. Please note that numbers will be limited to 50 – first come first served.