Special Operations Executive

Following the French campaign of 1940, the Special Operations Executive, a Spin-Off of MI 6 was organized on Winston Churchill's orders to help "Set Europe Ablaze".

Nicknamed, not inaccurately, the "Ministry of Ungentlemenly Warfare", the SOE conducted espionage and sabotage throughout World War II, as well as smuggling supplies to La Résistance and providing British emisaries to the various rebel leaders.

In a way the SOE's experience of World War II was closer to the James Bond image then that of the rest of British intelligence, for they were expected to look for trouble more often and, it being wartime and all, they really did have a Licence to Kill. Aside from normal Jurisdiction Friction that could cause a headache as the MI6 could be working on an op for a long time and then the SOE would blow something up and lure cops to the neighborhood forcing everyone underground. However their somewhat more cinematic image very few even of the SOE had eighty women in a two hour movie (given that a lot of them, the radio-operators particularity, were women that would have been even cooler) or engaged in car chases that destroyed two dozen cars on a regular basis. And it is not clear that many SOE agents would have worried about whether their drink was shaken or stirred. Sometimes Real Life can be boring.

The SOE was headquartered in London 64 Baker Street (nicknamed the "Baker Street Irregulars") with dozens of training camps throughout the U.K. plus facilities in Singapore, Haifa, and Canada.

After World War II the SOE was abolished and its resources were absorbed by the main body of MI 6.

Appearances of SOE in fiction:

Literature

The Laundry is (in its universe) the only part of SOE that survived, which is only part of why relationships with MI 6 are strained at best.

Live Action TV

Churchill's Secret Agents: The New Recruits is a week-long BBC reality miniseries which has ordinary civilians put through a close imitation of the declassified SOE training course, sometimes with surprising results. The show is interspersed with entertaining anecdotes of operations. It is available for Americans on Netflix.

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