Operation SNAFFLE

This was an SOE operation ordered during the Fall of France in May/June 1940 to rescue as many French occult references and libraries as possible before the Germans could get them. SNAFFLE was an ad hoc operation conducted in a scrambling hurry, with some ‘rescues’ amounting to little more than theft at gunpoint.1

The Laundry never returned most of the items collected by SNAFFLE, and the operation has been a sore point between the British and French OCCINTEL bodies for decades. DCRI still bring it up from time to time when they’re in a pissy mood. All this unpleasant history makes assignment to CAPSTONE VALET, the British-French Permanent Liaison Working group, a miserable posting. And it will only get worse…

SNAFFLE was just one example of the astounding arrogance of the Laundry running rough-shod over the European OCCINTEL community during and after the Second World War. Britain was the only continental actor with Turing technology until French mathematicians independently re-discovered it in the late 1960s, and where the Laundry didn't simply ignore European governments' wishes, they dictated terms unilaterally. The Americans basically withdrew their OCCINTEL body from Europe in 1949, and vacated even a second-hand role after 1960, when BROTHERHOOD collapsed. They didn't try to re-establish a permanent presence on the continent until the Reagan administration, and were thwarted only because, as badly as the French hated the British, they hated the Americans even more…


Codename Archive

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License