Back to something which is my cinematic comfort zone which is WWII two movies mostly British ones but also ones like this one where the focus is on Britain’s role in the European theatre of conflict. This one also piqued my interest because of the centrality to the plot of clandestine radio operators and the cat and mouse game that the radio operators played with the German direction finding crews, who were gruesomely efficient at their job of locating transmissions from resistance, in this case Dutch resistance operatives and therefore shutting down resistance operations. Some good footage at the start of the movie of what looks like one of the infamous German DF’ing (direction finding) vans with the directional receiving antenna on its roof.
The House of Intrigue’s plot is based on a real life failure by the British to run agents in the occupied Netherlands and revolves around a Dutch resistance radio operator who is captured by the Germans and instead of being shot on sight as a resister or a spy, he was turned by threat and psychological tricks, to transmit on behalf of the Germans. The British Special Operations Executive (SOE) that ran agents in occupied Europe understood that there was a danger of radio operators being caught and instructed their agents to insert a security code, an error every specific number of syllables or words to show SOE that they were free to transmit. Transmit the messages without the security identifying mistakes and it should have shown SOE that this agent had been captured and was operating under coercion. Unfortunately due to human and administrative error the lack of security identifiers in the messages was not noticed until it was too late. The mistake condemned dozens of agents sent thereafter to the Netherlands to capture and death at the hands of the Germans.
I’m not going to give any spoilers but what I will say is this movie is a very well done very well scripted spy thriller with lots of twists and turns.
Hope you enjoy it
Here it is
