Behind the celebrated code-breaking at Bletchley Park lies another secret… The men and women of the ‘Y’ (for Wireless’) Service were sent out across the world to run listening stations from Gibraltar to Cairo, intercepting the German military’s encrypted messages for decoding back at the now-famous Bletchley Park mansion. Such wartime postings were life-changing adventures – travel out by flying boat or Indian railways, snakes in filing cabinets and heat so intense the perspiration ran into your shoes - but many of the secret listeners found lifelong romance in their far-flung corner of the world. Now, drawing on dozens of interviews with surviving veterans, Sinclair McKay tells their remarkable story at last.

A history of the elaborate and brilliantly sustained World War II intelligence operation by which Hitler's generals were tricked into giving away vital Nazi secrets At the outbreak of World War II, MI6 spymaster Thomas Kendrick arrived at the Tower of London to set up a top secret operation: German prisoners' cells were to be bugged and listeners installed behind the walls to record and transcribe their private conversations. This mission proved so effective that it would go on to be set up at three further sites--and provide the Allies with crucial insight into new technology being developed by the Nazis. In this astonishing history, Helen Fry uncovers the inner workings of the bugging operation. On arrival at stately-homes-turned-prisons like Trent Park, high-ranking German generals and commanders were given a "phony" interrogation, then treated as "guests," wined and dined at exclusive clubs, and encouraged to talk. And so it was that the Allies got access to some of Hitler's most closely guarded secrets--and from those most entrusted to protect them.

As seen on pbs and Channel 4 documentary "Spying on Hitler's Army"...This is the story of the German émigrés who fled Hitler's regime and became secret listeners for British Intelligence during the Second World War. Behind the walls of the M Room (M for 'miked') they bugged the conversations of over 10,000 German PoWs, including 59 German Generals at Trent Park in North London. Providing a detailed, oft humorous, insight into life of the Generals in captivity, the book shows the farcical 'stage-set' in which they found themselves. But against this backdrop, the secret listeners eavesdropped on admission of war crimes and terrible atrocities against Russians, Poles and Jews; as well as details of an SS mutiny in a concentration camp in 1936, and Hitler's human 'stud farms'. This story places firmly on record just how much British and American Intelligence knew about Hitler's annihilation programme and how early. Why at the end of the war were these files not released for the war crimes trials to bring the perperators to justice? Was this one of the darkest secrets of the war? These transcripts, and thousands of others, of some of the most important Nazi secrets remained classified until 1999. During their clandestine work the secret listeners did not set eyes on a single German PoW, yet their work and the intelligence they gained was as significant for winning the war as Bletchley Park and cracking the Enigma Code. For over sixty years the listeners never spoke about their work, not even to their families. Many went to their grave bearing the secrets of the nation which had saved them from certain death.

Bletchley Park was where one of the war’s most famous – and crucial – achievements was made: the cracking of Germany’s “Enigma” code in which its most important military communications were couched. This country house in the Buckinghamshire countryside was home to Britain’s most brilliant mathematical brains, like Alan Turing, and the scene of immense advances in technology – indeed, the birth of modern computing. The military codes deciphered there were instrumental in turning both the Battle of the Atlantic and the war in North Africa. But, though plenty has been written about the boffins, and the codebreaking, fictional and non-fiction – from Robert Harris and Ian McEwan to Andrew Hodges’ biography of Turing – what of the thousands of men and women who lived and worked there during the war? What was life like for them – an odd, secret territory between the civilian and the military? Sinclair McKay’s book is the first history for the general reader of life at Bletchley Park, and an amazing compendium of memories from people now in their eighties – of skating on the frozen lake in the grounds (a depressed Angus Wilson, the novelist, once threw himself in) – of a youthful Roy Jenkins, useless at codebreaking, of the high jinks at nearby accommodation hostels – and of the implacable secrecy that meant girlfriend and boyfriend working in adjacent huts knew nothing about each other’s work.

Despite all that has already been written on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Persico has uncovered a hitherto overlooked dimension of FDR's wartime leadership: his involvement in intelligence and espionage operations. Roosevelt's Secret War is crowded with remarkable revelations: -FDR wanted to bomb Tokyo before Pearl Harbor -A defector from Hitler's inner circle reported directly to the Oval Office -Roosevelt knew before any other world leader of Hitler's plan to invade Russia -Roosevelt and Churchill concealed a disaster costing hundreds of British soldiers' lives in order to protect Ultra, the British codebreaking secret -An unwitting Japanese diplomat provided the President with a direct pipeline into Hitler's councils Roosevelt's Secret War also describes how much FDR had been told--before the Holocaust--about the coming fate of Europe's Jews. And Persico also provides a definitive answer to the perennial question Did FDR know in advance about the attack on Pearl Harbor? By temperament and character, no American president was better suited for secret warfare than FDR. He manipulated, compartmentalized, dissembled, and misled, demonstrating a spymaster's talent for intrigue. He once remarked, "I never let my right hand know what my left hand does." Not only did Roosevelt create America's first central intelligence agency, the OSS, under "Wild Bill" Donovan, but he ran spy rings directly from the Oval Office, enlisting well-placed socialite friends. FDR was also spied against. Roosevelt's Secret War presents evidence that the Soviet Union had a source inside the Roosevelt White House; that British agents fed FDR total fabrications to draw the United States into war; and that Roosevelt, by yielding to Churchill's demand that British scientists be allowed to work on the Manhattan Project, enabled the secrets of the bomb to be stolen. And these are only a few of the scores of revelations in this constantly surprising story of Roosevelt's hidden role in World War II.

Albania's Communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, proclaimed his country to be the world's first truly atheistic state. Under Hoxha's rule, Captain Berti Dosti was one of the elite who served on a communications team monitoring Albania's borders for American incursions. However, this diligent soldier left his country unguarded for 15 minutes a week as he regularly tuned into Trans World Radio's broadcasts, ultimately becoming a believer. Had he been discovered he would probably have been shot. Yet this young man with a growing faith continued to listen and would later pioneer the rebuilding of Albania's wrecked society.

During the Second World War German intelligence had deployed wireless teams throughout occupied Europe. Agents had even been deployed to mainland Britain to spy on British military activity. Monitoring and reporting of their wireless transmissions fell to a small, secretive and largely unknown unit manned almost exclusively by volunteers. The Voluntary Interceptors (VI) as they became known would spend hours every day at home monitoring the short wavelengths for often faint and difficult to copy signals transmitted by these German secret intelligence services. This unit was to become known as the Radio Security Service (RSS) and was at the core of the signals intelligence production effort at Bletchley and the insights into German military tactical and strategic planning. Without interceptors like the RSS, Bletchley would not have existed. Their story has never truly been written and RADIO WAR focuses on the secret world of wireless espionage and includes first-hand accounts from the surviving veterans of the unit. Its existence was only made public 35 years after WWII ended, shortly after Bletchley Park's secrets were exposed. Patrick Reilly, the Assistant to Head of MI6 Stewart Menzies, was to say of the RSS.... `a team of brilliance unparalleled anywhere in the intelligence machine.'