SOE needed professional intelligence officers at its head, as we had in the Abwehr, and in particular it needed men adept at subversive warfare. Instead they sent us infants, keen and willing, but quite unfitted for that kind of warfare.

Englandspiel ('England Game'), or Operation North Pole (German: Unternehmen Nordpol), was a successful counterintelligence operation of the Abwehr (German military intelligence) from 1942 to 1944 during World War II. German counter-intelligence operatives, headed by Hermann Giskes of the Abwehr and Joseph Schreider of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), captured Allied resistance agents operating in the Netherlands and used the agents' radios and codes to dupe the United Kingdom's clandestine organization, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), into continuing to infiltrate agents, weapons, and supplies into the Netherlands. The Germans captured nearly all the agents and weapons sent by the United Kingdom (Britain).

Englandspiel was a "catastrophe" for SOE and the Dutch resistance, "a textbook illustration, the world over, in how not to conduct clandestine work." Fifty-four SOE agents sent from England were captured by the Germans and only four survived. The other fifty were executed or died in concentration camps. The Dutch resistance was substantial in numbers but lacked weapons. If armed, as had been the objective of SOE, it might have played an important role helping the allied military forces in their failed attempt to expel the Germans from the Netherlands in 1944.

The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was created by the United Kingdom on July 22, 1940, in accordance with Prime Minister Winston Churchill's directive to "set Europe ablaze." The objective of the SOE was to undertake "irregular warfare" with sabotage and subversion in countries occupied by Nazi Germany and other Axis powers. SOE agents in occupied countries allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England. Section N was created within SOE to deal with the Netherlands. Section N had four chiefs during the war: RV Laming, Charles Blizard (known as Blunt), Seymour Bingham, and RI Dobson. In the words of MRD Foot, official historian of the SOE, Section N was "not always noted for efficiency."

The opposite numbers of the SOE leaders in the German-occupied Netherlands were Majors Hermann Giskes of the Abwehr and Joseph Schreieder of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence service of the SS.

The Netherlands presented geographical challenges to the Dutch resistance and the British intelligence agencies wishing to infiltrate agents and supply arms and supplies to the resistance groups. The country was densely populated and lacked forests and mountains where resistance forces could hide; isolated areas suitable for landing aeroplanes or parachute drops of arms and supplies for the resistance were hard to find; the coast was flat and the beaches guarded and often mined by the Germans, offering little opportunity to bring in agents and supplies by boat or submarine. Moreover, the Netherlands did not border any neutral, unoccupied country which could be used as a staging ground for resistance activities.

Thus began das Englandspiel... an extraordinary two-year Abwehr operation that netted more than fifty London-sent Dutch agents... not to mention hundreds of tons of arms and explosives. The worst disaster in SOE history, it would virtually decapitate the Dutch resistance movement.

In late summer 1941, a Dutch agent of the British intelligence agency MI6 was arrested by the Germans in the Netherlands. He had with him a large number of coded messages, and a German cryptographer, Sergeant E. G. May, learned the MI6 cipher system. In February 1942, two MI6 agents were captured in the Netherlands, which added to the German knowledge of the British codes. At the time, SOE depended upon MI6 for its communications and ciphers.