SPECIAL OPERATIONS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 804, 17 December 1954, Page 14

SPECIAL OPERATIONS

THE STARR AFFAIR, by Jean Overton Fuller; Victor Gollancz, English price 13/6. AY ISS FULLER is a painstaking detective who first tells the story of the Starr affair in simple, straightforward fashion, and then relates in detail how she collected the material in the course of her research for her earlier book Madeleine. She uses the provocative research technique of passing on the remarks of A and B to C, who replies forcefully with counter-arguments which are in turn submitted to A and B. The result is an interesting little book which shatters a few lingering illusions about wartime special operations in enemy countries. The main point of contention is Starr’s conduct as a prisoner of the German counter-espionage service in Paris. He gave his parole and enjoyed certain privileges (one of them the privilege of not being shot), and in exchange did some draughting work and mapping for the Germans, mostly copying jobs. The

price he paid for these privileges was suspect: did the Germans use him as a dupe to obtain information from other prisoners over hidden microphones? Starr, on the other hand, maintains with apparent truth that he accepted these privileges so that he could learn something of the German organisation, and that he tried constantly by devious means to give the Special Operations Executive in London some hint of the true position in France, where the Germans were operating many of the organisation’s wireless sets and_ collecting British agents and windfall gifts of arms and equipment almost as they dropped.

W.A.

G.