Talk:Madeleine Barclay

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Talk:Madeleine Barclay. This article states that she joined SOE in 1940, then joined Section D of SIS in 1941. This seems to be cut-and-pasted from a confused website. Section D of SIS was the pre-war department of SIS for deniable operations: where SIS was primarily concerned with observing, to gain intelligence, occasionally it had to intervene in a situation to produce the desired result.That would be the task of Section D. When the war broke out, destruction of enemy property was legitimised and became the task of special operations organisations. In mid-1940 Section D merged with the Army special operations department, M.I.(R). The merged organisation was SOE. SOE was formed largely by Section D veterans, so SIS would not need to create a new Section D to replace it, as SOE was subordinated to the needs of SIS (ie. destruction operations would not be authorised if they threatened existing intelligence operations), which, for example, controlled all SOE signals for most of the war.The job of HMS Fidelity in the early years was to insert agents into Southern France (probably for SIS as well as SOE) and extract sundry vulnerable people on the way out, eg. escapers. In 1942, the Germans occupied Vichy France and the changed circumstances made the use of the ship unfeasible.Protozoon (talk) 06:48, 4 July 2008 (UTC)