Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

(Michael S) #1

388 • NETHERLANDS SECTION


period Indonesia posed a threat to British and Dutch interests in the
region.

NETHERLANDS SECTION.Designated N Section, theSpecial Op-
erations Executive(SOE) branch running agents into theNether-
landswas headed by Richard V. Laming, who had run a shipping
company on the Rhine but was compromised as aSecret Intelli-
gence Service(SIS) source by the Venlo incident. His deputy was
Lionel Loewe, formerly the SIS deputy head of station in The Hague
in 1939. N Section’s first agent was parachuted home in August 1940
but was captured within six weeks. The real disaster took place in
March 1942 when another agent, Huub Lawers, was persuaded by the
Abwehrto report his safe arrival over his radio; Lawers deliberately
omitted his security check as a warning, but the omission was ig-
nored in London. The resulting deception, codenamednordpolby
the Germans, resulted in more than 50 SOE agents perishing before
SIS learned of the penetration in May 1943 and warned SOE, which
was reluctant to believe it. Laming was replaced by Charles Blizard
in February 1942, but he was moved a year later to SOE’s J Section
to run operations inItalyand was succeeded by his ineffectual dep-
uty, Seymour Bingham. The SIS investigation of the fiasco, con-
ducted by ColonelJack Cordeaux, has never been declassified and
released.


NICHOLSON, LESLIE.Leslie Nicholson was well liked by his col-
leagues and known as a raconteur of entertaining and irreverent anec-
dotes about his experiences as aSecret Intelligence Service(SIS)
officer in prewar Czechoslovakia and Estonia. He had been posted to
Prague in 1930 and spent the next 20 years in SIS. However, when
his wife fell ill, he asked ‘‘C,’’Sir Stewart Menzies, for a loan. Un-
wisely, Menzies refused, offering instead to commute what pension
Nicholson was due. When his wife died, Nicholson moved to the
United States and wreaked his revenge on SIS in 1967 by publishing
Secret Agent, an amusing account of his prewar career.
Nicholson wrote about being recruited by SIS in London in 1929
and persuaded to resign his army commission. His first assignment
was to Vienna, where he was briefed by the local head of station in
Vienna, Thomas Kendrick, although Nicholson discreetly omitted his

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