This show has filled a long-standing blank for me. In one history of the WWII North Africa campaign, a vague mention is made of a group of "French" paratroopers who, having somehow become isolated from their forces, lived and fought from a remote and deserted fort.
The SAS was still secret when the book was written, but their archives record that French paratroopers had indeed been sent to join the fledgling regiment hunkered in the ruins. They joined ruthless soldiers who would do anything, including mow down unarmed men, to hinder Rommel's advance.
The inner coldness of the characters evoked memories of "Twigsnapper" who once once told Linda that he had been an absolutely murderous youth. (She tells the story with an Irish accent on "murderous" ) He made it quite clear through his posts and through stories she repeated to me, that violence was never off the table for him.
But he like William Stephenson, had a fetish about remaining hidden, even in his later years, when he was shoveling out horse stalls, and doing odd jobs around a successful metropolitan stable. Few, if any, people knew that he was the owner.
"Twigsnapper" has said/implied that his first assignment was to minisub duty. Having lied about his age to get into the service, he was not above lying about being able to swim. It also helped that he was a slightly built youth.
One of the first two X-2 subs off the production line was put at the disposal of Lt.Cdr. Ian Fleming. He planned to go trout fishing, and the subs would be his flies:
.On 29 September 1939, soon after the start of the war, Godfrey circulated a memorandum that, "bore all the hallmarks of ... Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming", according to historian Ben Macintyre.[37] It was called the Trout Memo and compared the deception of an enemy in wartime to fly fishing.[37] The memo contained several schemes to be considered for use against the Axis powers to lure U-boats and German surface ships towards minefields
One sub was used to ferry agents to Norway, for the frogman operations that took out the battleship Tirpitz.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-class_submarine
But Fleming's bigger responsibility was to protect Gibraltar. Frogman Lionel "Buster" Crabbe was in service on Gibraltar during that time. In order to place limpet bombs on German ships, he would have used an X2 for his taxi. There must be some fascinating records of X2 operations in the Mediterranean locked away somewhere.
I will always think that Crabbe was summonsed by TPTB in British Intelligence, some fifteen years later, to conduct one last mission and then disappear.
in my imagination,In the history of the Soviet Navy there is a story of a disillusioned and dissolute defector sharing the closest held secrets of the Royal Navy's underwater demolition teams with special forces recruits at a base on the Black Sea.
Somewhere "Morgan" has spoken about "us" sending some of our folks over there. What was originally intended to be "us, over here" and "us over there" eventually morphed into "us over here" and "them over there".
Well, as Paul says, it's a story. It may not be the story, but it is not an impossible story.
The reason I think that may be possible is because Crabbe's disappearance was closely bracketed in a twelve month span of time by two Townsend Brown events,
Linda has a photo of Townsend in Paris with Twigsnapper, and four young East German sailors. The photo has Jacques Bergier's WWII code name and Resistance number penciled on the back. I believe this is a photo of an American, British, French intelligence operation, and they are celebrating something more significant to them than Townsend's birthday.
Twigsnapper has said that this group was somehow connected to the subsequent events at the Sally Port Inn in Portsmouth, England. Crabbe was staying there at the time of his disappearance. This story seems to conclude, purposefully, on the anniversary of Einstein's death.
The second event is one I have deduced from following Townsend's trail. He left Paris, went to England, and then returned home to Virginia for a couple of hours before disappearing from Linda's life for a year.
The time he was missing coincides perfectly with the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58, when earth sciences research was to be conducted and shared by all nations around the globe. This agreement provided the cover that allowed Townsend to set up the radar intelligence stations, for the purposes of collecting "cosmic radiation" data. The US wanted a network of these, located at the exit points of the different U2 Flyover path point's around the Soviet Union. (Whatever Townsend was doing for the U2 program, he was doing with the knowledge, that the US would soon be developing sophisticated reconnaissance satellites, and they, too, would have missions that needed to be supported by ground stations.)
But, like East Germany, many of the countries on the periphery of Soviet Russia, were closed to westerners at the time, so the closest we could get to their borders was with a listening post in Turkey, on or near the Black Sea.
So my inner story teller is searching for the link that these three events together. I know it is in there, somewhere.
Jan
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