The story is at once confusing and fascinating. The  Vichy regime tracked down left wing resistants  and supporters of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces. It deported slave works and Jews to Germany. Yet concurrently, it tracked down and arrested hundreds of German agents who sought to further undermine France militarily. More than one hundred of them were sentenced to death, and Kitson  writes that he found “formal proof” that eight were actually executed.  A ranking French counterintelligence officer, Paul Paillole, puts the number of 42, which to Kitson “seems credible.”  Other efforts were directed against British officers seeking to organize resistance groups preparing for the inevitable invasion. As the papers make plain, the French military harbored a keen sense that it was “betrayed” by England in the opening months of the war.

To understate, French internal politics of the era were devilishly confused. Curiosity directed me to a book remainder house, where I found a 2005 biography of Petain by Charles Williams, a former Labour member of the British House of Lords. As I frequently discover as I age, the “full story” is often more complex than we were taught in school. So be it with Petain’s Vichy government.

Kitson is a highly-recommended  read for anyone interested in the intricacies of counterintelligence.