ABSTRACT
In the early days of the Second World War, when there was a chronic shortage of qualified linguists, the British government undertook a series of extraordinary measures to recruit personnel who could be used for covert intelligence and propaganda work. This included the recruitment by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) of a handful of ardent anti-fascist Italian émigrés in the United States. Their mission, under British supervision, was to conduct a political warfare campaign among the burgeoning number of Italian prisoners-of-war (POWs) who had been transported to and incarcerated in India during 1941. This policy was one of several initiatives formulated by London in its campaign to rally opposition to Italian fascism, the ultimate objective of which was the creation of a Free Italy movement.
