We were delighted to host bestselling author and Borders cultural impresario, Alistair Moffat, to talk about his new book, Assassins and Secret Listeners: Britain’s Invisible Armies 1939-1945.

The book reveals long lost secrets from across wartime Britain, but the first clues of the existence of networks of secret listeners and trained assassins and saboteurs were uncovered in Selkirk…

Hands on headphones, men and women, drawn from all walks of civilian life, listened to the coded messages of German intelligence and passed hundreds of thousands of them on to Bletchley Park.

At the same time, men with firearms experience were recruited into secret patrols trained in sabotage and silent killing. In June 1940, with a full-scale German invasion expected any minute, these auxiliary units were poised to undertake suicidal missions attacking enemy supply lines and assassinating anyone who helped the Nazis.

Alistair Moffat tells the half-forgotten stories of immense bravery by thousands of ordinary men and women. Sworn to secrecy, their heroic work has long been overlooked, yet it played a crucial part in the Allied victory in 1945. This book finally pays them their due.