The Second Battle of Britain - a Soviet Sealion

What's with Austria? With Russians in Bavaria, they are toast. Unless Italy is mobilizing to reinforce Austria. Toast as in their biggest cities are on the border other then Graz. Viena, Linz, Salzburg, Innsbruck all very vulnerable with Russians in Bavaria.

'Operation save the MG but glass Birmingham'?
Thank you. More coming soon.




Yep, that southern gain was the withdrawal that the West Germans didn't want o do but were forced to see the reality of doing. Throughout all of the occupied areas, full control isn't complete either: there will be organised stay-behinds as well as small groups of cut-off troops who'd fight to the end. The big urban areas aren't under direct occupation either.



Just stay away from a place called Cannerberg outside of Maastricht. It might as well have a big X atop it: X for nuke me.




Austria is neutral and will be in a bad way. The Americans are furious at them because their SecState, plus the West German foreign minister, were both kidnapped from Austrian soil by what was clearly the Soviets and nothing has been done about that... though what can Austria do after the fact? They do not want to be in this war. they are mobilised but doing everything to stay out. Their Draken fighters haven't fired on Soviet aircraft making attacks on Italy either.


I agree with this reasoning.
Austrian defences would be hampered by more than just geography. Post WW2 restrictions - the Austrian State Treaty of 1955 - banned Austria from all 'offensive' arms: that term was applied harshly too. Austria doesn't have a chance in a fight.
I've been thinking about an Italian deployment. Rome promised Worner help as part of NATO unity but I'm not sure in what form that could take. Any troops & aircraft means a stripping of Italian defence son the Alps plus Italy might want to get involved in the Aegean. I still need to think on this.

The Britons; two


The landlady of the Royal Oak known as Sarah Smith (née Mitchell) had been born forty-one years previously in the Saxony town of Neustadt. Neustadt was at the time in Allied-occupied Germany, within the Soviet Sector. Her mother was no more than a child herself and the new-born baby whose name on the birth certificate was Sabine Escher spent her first few years in an orphanage when her mother could no longer raise her alone. It was strongly suspected that her father had been one of the many rampaging soldiers of Stalin who had raped their way through Germany in the Nazi regime’s dying days but her mother had said nothing. Adopted by an older couple who had lost their sons in the war, Sabine grew up as the German Democratic Republic did. She was given a home among a family who had prominence under that regime: their sons hadn’t been soldiers for Hitler but rather communists killed by the Nazis. Her early childhood and teenage years saw Sabine raised in the ‘correct’ way that East Germany’s rulers wanted children to. She was an excellent student, bright and keen with an affinity for politics too. Spotted by a recruiter when at university, Sabine was drawn into the world of the Stasi. It was a slow process. She was tested many times before there was any trust placed with her. Sabine didn’t let anyone down. Her parents passed away before she ever served overseas on behalf of her country. Though by then, she was married with a child of her own quickly on the way. The husband and son were left behind as Sabine went to foreign lands.

The HVA had assessed her as one of their most promising young agents for undercover work. Sabine picked up foreign languages, learnt the art of tradecraft and the mastered the ability to deceive with ease. Serving first in Austria and then later in Sweden, Sabine’s initial work for the HVA wasn’t taxing. This was mainly about her learning how to successfully pass herself off as someone she wasn’t for a long period. She helped move messages, emptied dead-drops and conducted reconnaissance work before slowly moving to more difficult espionage roles. There were infrequent visits home. In Dresden, her husband also worked for the Stasi though in an administrative position. Sabine had a distant relationship with her son and it pained her to leave him yet that was what she did. What was important than anything else in her life was her work for her country. In 1972, Sabine was sent to Britain. She became Sarah. There had been the identity of a dead child procured for her already and a legend had been established. There was intelligence work to be done in Britain and that involved her being partnered – in all sense of the word – with John.


John Smith was born two years earlier than Sabine / Sarah with him having the name at birth of Gunther Rädel. This took place in Berlin with him born to parents who lived in Hitler’s capital. Too young to be influenced by the Nazis, he grew up in the eastern half of the city where the Soviets occupied Berlin. He was raised as a communist even though his parents weren’t as committed to the cause as they appeared to be. Gunther was a member of the Socialist Unity Party’s young people’s movements and made his mark as a teenager within the Free German Youth where his politics didn’t deviate from the norms but his enthusiasm shone through. He was spotted by someone tasked to look for the ‘right sort’ of young men. A Stasi file was opened on his before he was fourteen. He was monitored through his schooling and then his military service with the Border Guards to keep a check on his character. Gunther had no idea of all of this. At the end of his period of conscription with the Grenztruppen, he was formally approached to join the HVA. This came about when Gunther applied for the Stasi’s Felix Dzerzhinsky Guard Regiment – its armed paramilitary force – to continue his service to the state and instead he found himself before a different panel of senior men than he would have expected. Gunther was told that he would be undertaking special tasks though there were no initial details. He volunteered for this all without knowing what it was all about.

Overseas Gunther went. He served many roles under various identities preforming different tasks for the HVA. Gunther didn’t put a foot wrong. His career record was without blemish, only praise. The selection of him as a candidate for undercover work where he would assume a different identity came after several years and again he went into it without the full knowledge of what it was all about. He was a joiner, someone willing to keep taking the next step. Likewise with Sabine, he arrived in Britain and was given the identity of a child who had died young with the groundwork already done for him on that. He left behind in East Germany his two daughters. Their mother had passed away in childbirth with the second daughter. Most of their childhood for Gunther’s daughters was spent with their grandparents. Gunther well understood that without them remaining back in East Germany, he would never have gone overseas. They were hostages to his loyalty. A wife was assigned to him once in Britain. He considered that he had martial rights over her and no objection was put up to that despite her marriage to someone back home. Gunther didn’t give the issue much thought beyond his basic needs though their controlling officer assigned to them – and others – operating in Britain told him that his new wife would do her duty for her country: her duty being to make sure that their partnership was a harmonious one.


For fifteen years, John and Sarah Smith, no longer Gunther and Sabine, had been undertaking intelligence work in Britain. They had been running country pubs near to military bases. This meant moving about every few years though always doing the same thing: taking advantage of patrons of their establishments for the purposes of gaining information from them. The HVA had long ago taught them each all the tricks of the trade. Ideology was favoured by their employers as the primary means of gaining cooperation for intelligence gathering but the practicalities of what John and Sarah faced meant that they used financial and sexual incentives as well as deception and blackmail to get the job done. They recruited few agents of their own. That was a risky business. It was far easier to have people work for them or do their bidding without understanding what was ultimately going on. The controllers that they worked with, senior HVA people often on the move, helped with the logistics of this all. John would often get involved in what appeared to be low-level but well-connected criminal enterprises. He would find a way to help someone who he identified as knowing what he wanted to know and entrap that target in a scheme without tipping his own hand. The target would then reveal what John wanted to know either to help himself or believe he was helping John. The lies told were complicated! Sarah ran the B-&-Bs that came with the pubs they moved to. At least two bedrooms in each would soon become recording venues for audio and video images. Prying into people’s private lives was a hallmark of the Stasi and, like its parent organisation, the HVA did the same. Most of the time, what was said in bedrooms rather than what was done in them was of more importance. Yet, because of the very look-the-other-way, wink-wink attitude what John and Sarah gave to the use of the rooms in the B-&-B by the locals they befriended, recording of physical interactions were remarkable useful on occasions too. The possibility of revelations of shameful acts were used to force people to do or tell things when they didn’t want to. Blackmail was a risky business. It had backfired on Sarah once before, in quite the spectacular fashion. John came back to find her with a dead body. There had been a failed blackmail target who had reacted violently when he caught on ahead of the planned attempt to make the approach. Sarah had killed him when he tried to kill her. The two of them had put the – bloody cut-up – remains of a that man into a beer barrel. A special collection had to be made by the brewery lorry afterwards. It was the first person who died in the midst of their operations and they believed that he would be the only one. A police investigation into the disappearance of a civilian contractor who worked at RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, then an airbase from where the RAF flew V-bombers from, didn’t point towards John and Sarah in the end. That hadn’t been one of their success stories despite the escape from detection.

Their first controller had been Thomas. He was a fellow East German like they were, a purported travelling salesman. John and Sarah worked with him for many years and he assisted with their infrequent & short travels home to see families for snatched moments. The primary job of Thomas, and those who came after him, was to keep an eye on what they were up to and supervise their taskings. This was intelligence work around people related to British military sites. The focus was on getting information back home on the UK Armed Forces, that being of a useful nature. Steve had been another controller though only for a short period. Then there was Rosemary. Since ’82, she had been with them. She had a job within the NHS that involved her travelling throughout East Anglia: John and Sarah were assigned to her when they moved first to a pub near Colchester Garrison before they were then outside RAF Woodbridge. Her assignment to them continued as they reached Narborough close to RAF Marham. Rosemary wasn’t as professional as she was supposed to be. John and Sarah were required as per Stasi employees to make confidential reports on one another – with each not supposed to know the other was doing this – about their continued political reliability and also on their controlling officer too. The sealed reports weren’t supposed to be read in-country but back in East Berlin. Each of them had put into those reports on Rosemary that she was sloppy and her talk was careless. John knew too much about the Cromer smuggling connection than he was supposed to (it helped with his criminal schemes to entrap the unsuspecting) but was meant to be compartmentalised while Sarah discovered the background on Leah through Rosemary. Leah had joined them when they came to Narborough. A Briton, not a HVA officer, the young woman was an ideological recruit of another agent some time past. She worked for East Germany because she believed in the cause. A lot of that work was done on her back. This eased the strain on Sarah for John’s bedroom demands so she was thankful for this but Rosemary let slip Leah’s background and length of service. It could have been a trap, something to check up on Sarah’s dedication. She added it to her regular report at the next opportunity though because that was what she was trained to do.

Marham was a busy jet base for the RAF’s fleet of Tornado strike-bombers. Neither John nor Sarah had ever stepped inside the facility. They knew people who went in & out of there as well as locals who were connected to those who did. Information trickled out to them and they fulfilled their task of intelligence gathering. Those aircraft which flew from Marham were nuclear-rolled aircraft with the expectation that in a conflict – which either started out nuclear or went that way quickly – they would be dropping those bombs over on the Continent. Rosemary had the two of them make preparations to aid in the stopping of that should Britain and its NATO partners ever decide to go to war with East Germany and its fraternal allies. This meant that they conducted close-up observation of Marham’s perimeter to aid others in attacking it. Commandos would come here in wartime and those men would need to have on-hand equipment and facilities of their own to make the attack the HVA officers scouted for. Two separate sites, one near and one far, were selected as field camps for those commandos. Each was stocked with weapons and supplies. John and Sarah had done this elsewhere in Britain though understood that whoever took over their previous missions would create a whole new set-up… which meant that at least one partnership, maybe more, had already done what they did around Marham. The relationship between the two of them was close. Their partnership worked because there was always a division of labour that they could agree upon. When undertaking this necessary task of making preparations for the possible arrival of commandos one day, each of them did their bit. They used contacts to help them get what they needed to put inside the country hides that they set up. None of this was done quickly and all of it was done with care to avoid observation. Having Lady and Max with them was important. The German Shepherds were the perfect assistant for them. Working dogs with remarkable intelligence, the two dogs were in the pub and around their little house as well where they kept watch better than any security system. What John and Sarah set up in woodland for the use of commandos was what each of them regarded as a hypothetical thing in terms of each being used. Neither knew if East Germany’s army had any commandos of its own. Would the hides and weapons stocks, plus the intelligence portfolios which they created, be used by Soviet special forces? They had no idea. Their task was to follow orders on this and that they did. That was done all while they carried on with their intelligence tasks. It was something John put more thought into than Sarah did though. In one of the scheduled meetings with Rosemary, at a roadside café because their controller would never come to the pub nor house, he raised the question with her about whether that would involve he and Sarah working directly with arriving commandos in wartime. John was told not to concern himself with such thoughts. If they were to, they would be ordered to; it not, they would be instructed not to. End of conversation.


In the past few months leading up this August, John and Sarah did as they always did and paid attention to world affairs through the British media. Through their trained eyes and ears, the warlike propaganda put out by the regimes in London & Washington was seen for what it was: all a fraud. At first, Rosemary had told them that nothing would come of what began in the Gulf with Iraq. It shouldn’t affect them. They picked up comments made by patrons of the Royal Oak as that war spread. There was some feeling that one of the Tornado squadrons – with or without its nuclear bombs – would go to Saudi Arabia. Marham’s squadrons didn’t deploy overseas though. There was an RAF deployment to fight in the Second Gulf War against Rashid’s attempts to conquer the region but it didn’t involve anything directly to do with Marham. The crisis in the Middle East spread. It began to dominate the news. Rosemary told Sarah in one of their meetings – held in the open but where they spoke English never German to each other – that the Americans had attacked Soviet forces and imitated attacks elsewhere. Reagan the Cowboy was getting more and more dangerous. Thatcher down in London was supporting him. Things were getting worrisome, she’d said. John and Sarah instructed to transport to those hides in the countryside more weapons and supplies. The smuggling connection that John made use of to help entrap people who fancied dipping their toe in a fast cash scheme was used to send further weapons from Cromer on the coast down to both the abandoned shed and the underground tunnel carefully maintained. It was usually cigarettes, sometimes untaxed alcohol too, which came in by seas but now it was man-portable heavy weapons. Sarah replaced some of the older tins of foods with newer ones, added some more bottled drinking water and toppled up the first aid medical supplies too. She asked no questions of Rosemary as to why but she wasn’t stupid. It was clear to her that there was a thinking somewhere that these places would be soon seeing people in them. The world was getting closer to war.

Rosemary was replaced with Morgan. This switch in controlling agents came out of the blue. Morgan – first or last name, who knew? – took over at the end of July. He at once wanted to be brought up to speed on everything that they were doing. Morgan was unlikeable to both John and Sarah. They were aware that he had a meeting alone with Leah too and that wasn’t for the usual purposes in the bedroom where she had her own special skill set. Not telling his wife, John suspected that he wasn’t HVA at all but instead a Soviet intelligence officer. Sarah thought the same thing though, like her husband, kept that to herself. Each of them had had contacts with Soviets from the GRU & KGB before though when they’d been elsewhere in the world. Morgan was clearly someone who’d spent a long time pretending he was someone he wasn’t but a liar can always spot a liar. Whether the Soviets had their own people in Britain doing what they were doing was unconfirmed but suspected, yet this was supposed to be an East German exclusive operation. Morgan came into the Royal Oak too. No one seemed to take any notice of the quiet man who sat in the corner one evening before separately speaking to them both out of view. It was a break in the tradecraft which they usually followed though. Their base of operations was one where Rosemary nor her predecessors ever came into. He wanted to talk about those commando hides in the countryside and he also demanded information on recent events at Marham. Those Tornado squadrons were there and there had been the arrival for the Summer of the training squadron that was based down in Suffolk at RAF Honington. There was scheduled runway work being undertaken at Honington and so Marham was home to many more Tornados (those other ones had a wartime nuclear missions as well) than usual. Morgan wanted to know everything about the ongoing flying operations and details of wartime plans that John and Sarah had uncovered.

When that Soviet warship was sunk by the Americans off the Iraqi shoreline, John said to Sarah that he didn’t believe there would be a war. She was sure there would be. John believed that while the international situation was tense, this would all blow ever. Reagan was a warmonger, but in the Kremlin, they were level-headed and wouldn’t fall for his attempts to force a war. He didn’t want to believe that one was coming. Sarah did though. She thought her own side would start it too. Showing up to an urgent meeting two days later was Morgan. He told them what was going to happen. War was coming. John and Sarah were to support that war. They would first provide accommodation for two men who would arrive the next day. In years past elsewhere, Thomas and Rosemary had sent them lone people who would stay the night but the Royal Oak had never had guests delivered to it in such a manner. Everything about how Morgan spoke of the arrival of these two and how they were to be given keys to the premises plus their vehicle was unnerving. Strangers made people notice, especially if they were driving about the Land Rover that the locals knew belonged to those who ran the pub. Leah would drive the two away from the pub at the given time, Morgan told John and Sarah, and it would be out of the village in darkness: they weren’t going to be going up and down the main road past the post office and local shop several times! Several packages were going to arrive in the next few days too, both to the pub and their house that John and Sarah had. These weren’t to be opened. When it was necessary, the contents of those would too go with Leah and two B-&-B guests off elsewhere. John asked what he and Sarah were to do. Keep doing as I say, Morgan told them. He moved into their house, sleeping downstairs on the sofa in the living room. Sarah had expressed concern over the neighbours taking notice but Morgan – who seemed to have an answer ready for everything – told them he wouldn’t be poking his head outside.

The war started on the Sunday morning. Morgan told the two HVA officers of its impending beginning only a few hours before it did. He instructed John and Sarah that they were now to do exactly what he said. Their intelligence mission was over. They were to support the war effort with what he called ‘active measures’. Some more guests were coming soon too.

Plenty of those around.

It’s generally not a good idea to kill off or otherwise lose an in place intelligence officer. Too many source and sub source networks to lose. The locally recruited agents are another matter, there are are some who have no use behind a single purpose. Hat said, every country has their own objectives, and an HVA Officer would no doubt be aware that the KGB, or especially the GRU, would view them as relatively less important than a a fellow officer of their own service.

The officer in place is the recognized face for the organization with local agents. Killing them off hazards the use of the entire network. That said, accidents can always happen on linkup.

I fully agree with both of you on this. It isn't my intention to see such a demise for the character, especially not on purpose, for these reasons.
In fact, it is her comrades-in-arms who should be wary of her. Too much stress, things missed long ago on a psychological screening & that worry about how foreigneers would see her as disposable will see an accident occur when the two of them go walking in the woods.