When Spy Games Go Horribly Wrong - The Venlo Incident | True Life Spy Stories

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While the successes of the British Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS, are held in great admiration, its failures are often overlooked. For reasons of national pride, these are relegated to the archives of memory and are seldom portrayed on the silver screen.

It was on the 9th of November 1939 that MI6 fell victim to an elaborate sting orchestrated by the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS intelligence agency. On the outskirts of a small Dutch border town named Venlo, two senior MI6 intelligence officers were captured by the Nazis. Captain Sigismund Payne Best and Major Richard Stevens would spend the rest of World War 2 imprisoned. British intelligence in Europe was crippled at the worst possible time.

What became known as the Venlo Incident sent a shockwave through British intelligence and caused tremendous embarrassment for the British government. Even worse, however, was that it gave Adolf Hitler the political pretext he needed to move forward with his planned invasion of the Netherlands the following year.

This is the story of a British clandestine spying operation gone horribly wrong.

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