ABSTRACT
The still-hypothetical North African invasion plans lent enhanced importance to RygorSlowikowski’s ‘Agence Afrique’, which he had built up into an extensive network concentrating on military targets and which provided SIS’s main insight into this field. By great good fortune, the senior Vichy counter-espionage officer in Algeria, Achiary, was a secret sympathiser with the Allied cause. He became Rygor-Slowikowski’s friend and protector, but he came under suspicion and was replaced by an inspector from Vichy who did not share his pro-Allied views and came close to unmasking the réseau, in which Rygor-Slowikowski used resident Poles as his sub-agents in Oran, Constantine, Casablanca and other centres.4 Achiary himself was in touch with SIS, who arranged for a W/T receiver/transmitter to be delivered to him near Arzew in 1941 by a British submarine, which at the same time landed an agent of French nationality named Puech Sanson, who was on his way to Mostaganem, where his father had a factory producing Job cigarettes.5
