Shown right is the front page of a report written in 1944 or 1945 by an unknown psychoanalyst for Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE). The document was declassified by the Public Record Office (file HS 7/41) in March 2000.

It is one of the worst examples of Freudian bullshit we have come across and OffMSG believes that SOE's secret agents would have been entitled to throw its author out of an airplane over enemy territory. With a parachute, of course.

All documents © Crown Copyright

Thanks to The Smoking Gun for the Facsimile.

See below for background material on the SOE. Click here to read the full report.

Special Operations Executive - A Brief History

The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was formed in July of 1940 from two paramilitary groups (MI6's Section D and the War Department's MI(R)) plus a propaganda organisation (Department Electra House) under the control of the Ministry of Economic Warfare. Its rôle was to 'co-ordinate all action, by way of sabotage and subversion, against the enemy overseas'. SOE was headquartered at 64 Baker Street in London (referred to in the document as the 'Home Station').

British espionage efforts were crippled at the outset of the war when MI6's networks were almost totally compromised. The SOE started out to build new networks and co-ordinate, train and equip resistance movements in a variety of countries. Initially this was done by parachuting agents behind the lines 'on spec' but swiftly became more sophisticated. Treachery was a common hazard and several SOE networks were penetrated with spectacular success by German security agents and collapsed.

SOE selection was initially on the same word-of-mouth basis as pre-War recruitment into the other secret services, but was later better organised with interviews and proof of foreign language fluency being required. Initial training was conducted in England and Scotland with the agents undergoing training similar to that given to Commandos. Other training included tradecraft, resistance to interrogation, parachuting and signals.

SOE ultimately trained some 11,500 agents of whom 7,500 were deployed into highly dangerous missions into Nazi-occupied Europe. These men and women were responsible for arming half a million Frenchmen, who went on to conduct some 3,000 sabotage operations against the French railway system.

SOE's Far East section ‘Force 136’ armed Karen tribesmen in Burma with devastating effect; the Karen killed some 17,000 Japanese soldiers. SOE agents were also responsible for the assassination of the German governor of Czechoslovakia, as well as destroying a heavy water plant in Norway vital to the German atomic research program.

On 31^st August 1945 SOE began to be amalgamated with MI6.