It was November 1943, and Major Hardy Amies had a weapon he wanted to put into the hands of a man named André Wendelen. The device was called the Welrod, a pistol designed for one purpose: to kill in silence. It had no markings, no serial number, nothing that could be traced, and SOE had built it specifically for assassination. Amies sent a handwritten note along with the shipment.

It read: “Tibbles, the pistols are intended for the elimination of your enemies. Let us know as soon as you have any results. ”

Wendelen was one of Amies’ best agents, a star of the Belgian section who had volunteered to return to occupied territory. His mission, Tibbles 2, had been approved personally by the head of operations for SOE, who wrote, “It is far better to send the five Welrods and let them do what they can.

” The plan was simple: get the silent pistols into Belgium and let the resistance use them on the collaborators who had been undermining everything SOE had tried to achieve there. No one could be certain afterward that these particular Welrods were used to kill anyone, because most police records were destroyed in the final months of the war. But the killing did occur, and it was widespread. It was a long way for Amies to have come.

Born in 1909 in Maida Vale, London, he was the son of a civil servant and a mother who sold clothing. Before the war, he had worked in fashion houses and even run a textile factory in Germany in the 1930s, where he watched Nazism rise. Politics did not interest the flamboyant young designer; he was having the time of his life. By 1934, he was design director at the fashion firm Lachasse, mingling with Hollywood stars like Ginger Rogers.

The one thing that risked undoing everything was that Hardy Amies was gay, which was illegal in Britain at the time. The war changed everything. In 1940, as Britain stood alone, Amies was called up for officer training. The most unmilitary of men found himself in uniform, albeit a tailored one, and he rose to the rank of captain in the Intelligence Corps.

He spoke fluent French and impeccable German, and his business experience made him an efficient organizer. That skill set caught the attention of a shadowy outfit operating under the innocuous cover name MO1(SP), which was in fact the Special Operations Executive. Churchill had ordered SOE to “set Europe ablaze” with guerrilla tactics, sabotage, and propaganda. It recruited linguists, patriots, and people who thought outside the box.

Amies was exactly that kind of free thinker. His personnel file noted: “This officer has done very well on the course. He is far tougher both physically and mentally than his rather precious appearance would suggest. ”

In November 1941, Amies was sent to London to work in T section, the part of SOE responsible for Belgium.

He quickly found himself planning and executing missions into the occupied country, supervising the training and recruitment of agents. His flamboyant side always showed through. On one document listing a series of Shakespearean code names, he added: “What a wonderful cast. May I do the costumes?

” But beneath the levity, the work was deadly. Between July 1941 and October 1942, 45 agents, many of them selected by Amies, were parachuted or landed by boat into Belgium. Their mission was to make contact with men like Marcel Frankson, a young Belgian determined to strike back at Germany. Taking on a ruthless, well-armed opponent was an enormous task, and Frankson welcomed SOE’s help.

But Amies was running into serious trouble. Despite sending more than 40 agents, T section was failing. The Germans were firmly in control of Belgium, and their counter-espionage system was waiting. Two main German services were active against the networks: the Abwehr, which fought Allied intelligence, and the Geheime Feldpolizei, which protected the army against spies and saboteurs.

They were especially skilled at exploiting SOE’s weakness, the radio. Every time an operator used his set, the Funkabwehr, a special detection unit, could track the signal. Within months, the first radio operators were arrested. Many ended up in Saint-Gilles prison in central Brussels.

The code names of the captured agents became a roll call of T section’s early failures: Intersection, caught March 1942; Terrier, caught April 1942; Balaclava, caught May 1942. Worse, the Germans turned some captured agents, using their radios to send disinformation to London for months. One agent in particular, Armand Compion, was used by the Germans from early 1942 to dupe T section, requesting more weapons, money, and agents to be parachuted straight into German hands. And Belgium was crawling with fascist sympathizers and paid informers eager to hunt down resisters.

The most infamous of them all was Prosper Dezitter, the Abwehr’s number one Belgian agent. Dezitter had served in the Canadian Air Force in 1918, been charged with rape and embezzlement, and done time in a Belgian prison. After the invasion, he worked for the Germans masquerading as an Allied soldier or airman, infiltrating resistance networks and escape lines that smuggled downed aircrew out of the country. He had an extraordinary capacity to inspire trust, and some believed his actions led to the arrest of around 1,000 resisters.

Marcel Frankson’s small group encountered Dezitter to their cost. He infiltrated an escape line the group often used. In June 1943, Frankson’s friends in the resistance came across him again. This time, Dezitter tipped off the Germans about a safe house at Rue Jean Van Vossem in Ixelles, where a cell led by Marcel Demonceau was planning an assassination attempt on Léon Degrelle, the Belgian fascist leader.

The battle lasted for hours. Eventually the Germans captured the safe house and most of its occupants. Everyone was executed, including Demonceau, who was captured a month later. Back in London, Amies and his colleagues were in despair.

Thirty-two SOE agents had been captured. Again and again, Dezitter had ruined Amies’ plans. He had broken an elaborate propaganda mission in which an agent used carrier pigeons to smuggle copies of Belgian newspapers to London. Then he had thwarted a plan for two agents who were pilots to steal an Me 110 night fighter from a Nazi airfield.

By now it was personal. Amies wanted Dezitter’s head. SOE was desperate for something that could turn the tide, and it decided on a campaign of assassination. In June 1943, a top-level planning committee met and set a start date of October 1.

The minutes read: “Execution campaign. The council considered a paper recommending a concerted campaign against SS and Gestapo officials. The proposal was accepted, but should for the most part be confined to civilian officials, rather than soldiers. ” The operation was renamed Ratweek.

A call went out to all country sections to identify targets. For Amies, that meant getting approval from the Belgian government in exile, led by Hubert Pierlot. The government was a collection of politicians who had fled in 1940 and was riddled with infighting, with two rival intelligence agencies, the civilian Sûreté and the military Deuxième Section, all with their own agendas. Nothing could be done without their say-so.

Amies turned on the charm. Letters flew between his department and the Belgian government through its representative, Edouard Dezitter. In August 1943, Amies wrote: “It is proposed to hold a so-called Ratweek in all the occupied countries when a certain number of quislings are to disappear. Could you please create a list of possible candidates?

Yours, Major H. Amies. ”

The Belgians stalled. An increasingly impatient Amies pressed harder: “Am I to understand that your authorities do not want our boys to participate?

The matter is really getting very urgent. ”

That same month, Amies was promoted to acting head of T section. The personal burden mounted. At the same time, a letter arrived from MI5, referring to an earlier note about “the notorious Belgian Prosper Dezitter.

” It asked Amies to let MI5 know how the matter stood, “in particular with regard to Dezitter and whether or not your proposed Ratweek has taken place. ” Then came the bombshell. The Belgian government refused to allow the Ratweek hits on collaborators, including Dezitter: “My authority do not, for the time being, think it advisable to take special measures against Belgians collaborating with the enemy. This would involve too many difficulties.

”

The difficulty they feared was reprisals. The Germans were notorious for murdering civilians wherever sabotage or espionage occurred, and they reacted even more aggressively if one of their own was killed. The Belgian government in exile believed in judicial process: “Lists of traitors are being made up with a view to meeting out to them their just sentence after the war. ” By late October, the official deadline had passed.

Amies admitted defeat: “I am sorry. The Belgian authorities will not allow us to carry out Ratweek as originally intended. ”

On the surface, Ratweek had failed. But Amies was not finished.

He turned to André Wendelen, his top agent, and prepared to send in the Welrods. He also encouraged groups like the Front de l’Indépendance, communist-inspired partisans, to carry out the work. Marcel Frankson’s small group of saboteurs became an action squad for the Front, and his job was specific: to kill anyone working against the group. A Ratweek memo of the time describes a collaborator being arrested, interrogated, and shot through the nape of the neck.

As the operation continued, better news filtered through of more violence and retribution. Nazi sympathizers, pro-Nazi activists, and Rexist politicians were killed. Amies compiled the results and placed them under the heading “Ratweek. ” Even after it was officially over, the killing continued, and as 1943 turned to 1944, Frankson’s group kept executing collaborators.

One man still eluded them: Dezitter. Then a new SOE agent, François Matter, arrived in early 1944 with orders to make contact with Frankson’s group and coordinate their activities. Matter chose two weapons for the mission: a small . 38 automatic Colt, compact and concealable, and a Welrod.

His son later explained: “They’re free to choose. And my father chose … a Welrod. It was to be used to kill people because it’s not a weapon for war but it’s a weapon to eliminate something. ” The Welrod worked like a normal automatic pistol, its magazine doubling as the handle.

To fire, one pushed the bolt forward, turned it to close, made sure the safety was engaged, and pulled the trigger. It was silenced by a series of rubber washers inside the tube that trapped the sound. Chambered in 7. 65 Browning, the bullet left the barrel at about 900 feet per second, subsonic, so the only sound was the firing pin and the bullet striking its target.

One night, Matter decided to make his move. Dezitter was known to frequent a dance hall in the center of Brussels, so the group staked out the location for hours. But Dezitter never showed. It seemed he had got away with his crimes once again.

Despite that failure, Amies and his men transformed the overall picture in Belgium throughout 1943 and 1944. In November 1943, Brussels newspaper vans delivered the daily edition of Le Soir, but the resistance had replaced the Nazi-sponsored edition with a resistance-printed version full of articles ridiculing the Germans. It was a magnificent propaganda success. Sabotage operations and armed attacks increased, with Frankson in the thick of it.

Resisters blew up supplies of oil and fuel, locomotives, barges, factories, and communication lines. Group G, another prominent resistance organization, sabotaged the entire Belgian high-tension electricity network. By the summer of 1944, everyone, including the Germans, knew the Allied invasion of mainland Europe was coming. The Allied Supreme Command needed the resistance to escalate its harassment behind enemy lines.

In the days before D-Day, the US Army Air Force joined the RAF in dropping more and more weapons to SOE agents. T section was deeply involved, with hundreds of canisters of arms dropped into Belgium. On June 6, 1944, the Allies attacked the beaches of Normandy. They pushed into France, but the advance slowed as supplies could not keep up with demand.

The Allies desperately needed deep-water ports, and the Germans, as they withdrew toward the Reich, were destroying anything that might be of use: ports, railways, cranes, and infrastructure. Everything hinged on the capture of the last major port left: Antwerp. If it could be taken intact, its cranes and infrastructure would allow the Allies to reinforce their troops in northwest Europe. Amies and his agents were given the mission of protecting it.

T section was at the heart of an SOE plan called Counter Scorch, which used resistance groups under SOE control to prevent the port’s destruction. Amies sent in two wireless operators who kept resistance teams, notably from Group G, informed and supplied with regular drops of weapons, ammunition, and detailed instructions. As Allied ground troops approached in early September 1944, any German attempt to destroy the cranes or docks was robustly seen off. Antwerp’s port was held.

It fell almost intact, its canals and docks undestroyed, and supplies began to flow to the advancing armies. Belgium was liberated in nearly a week. Now came retribution. Resistance forces came out of hiding to police the handover when the Allies arrived, and the word went out to catch Prosper Dezitter.

Amies’ former foe was tracked down, imprisoned, and executed in Brussels four years later. Eisenhower praised the resistance in an open letter: “They can be justly proud of having, by their devoted heroism, contributed so largely to the liberation of their beloved homeland. ”

Amies himself was sent to Brussels, promoted to lieutenant colonel, and for six months headed an SOE mission to wind down the networks he had helped create. It was a personal moment of glory.

After the war, he returned to the glamorous world of fashion, setting up the label that bears his name with a wealthy co-investor. He designed countless outfits for Queen Elizabeth II and became her couturier. He was knighted in 1989. But he rarely acknowledged his part in SOE or the details of its Belgian missions.

If approached about Ratweek, he would simply say: “Sorry, old boy. I don’t know anything about it. ” It was only after his death that some of the truth about the dressmaker spy’s surprising past began to emerge.