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+Phil,
+Sorry I haven’t been in touch much, Churchill asked BOSS to set up an operations wing in the UK under the name of the Special Operations Executive and that has occupied a lot of my time. As soon as we got set up I was put in touch with Einar Skinnarland, an engineer from Vemork who had hijacked a coastal steamer and sailed to Aberdeen to join the war effort here. Churchill ordered us to work up plans to attack the plant and Einar helped us to brief an intelligence gathering team to infiltrate the region. Operation Grouse was launched in October with an advance party of four officers and NCOs led by Jens-Anton Poulsson. They were parachuted into the Hardangervidda as German patrols tended to avoid it, and after a period of observation they prepared the ground for a glider assault. Under the codename Operation Freshman we sent over two gliders carrying commandos equipped with explosives and everything they needed to effect an escape, but a combination of bad weather and bad luck killed the mission. Both gliders made it to the Norwegian coast, but one crashed early on, and the other in the mountains. We were not aware of survivors, and unfortunately the Germans now knew that the plant was a target and stepped up security. They lit up the place with floodlights, mined the approaches and, for a while, stepped up the guard rotas. Grouse volunteered to stay in place, changing their callsign to Swallow and continued to send intelligence reports. They reported that although the mines and lights were still in place there were signs that security was beginning to slacken.
+With these updates we decided to try again, and launched Operation Gunnerside. Six Norwegian commandos led by Joachim Ronnenberg were parachuted in from an RAF Halifax and joined up with Swallow. The attached document is their mission report. They sent it from the plateau while retreating from the plant in case they didn’t make it back, so have used a standard combination of basic ciphers to make it hard to crack but easy to implement. In training we recommended a combination of Casear shift and basic transposition. I leave it to you to decipher.
projects / cipher-tools.git / blobdiff