Colonel Richard Heslop, codenamed Xavier, was one of Britain's greatest special operations agents in France, organising resistance groups to sabotage German operations from late 1942 right through to D-Day. Yet his name barely gets a mention in many of the accounts of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). His work involved daily encounters with the terrifying possibilities of capture, torture and death. It was a job where a careless whisper could deliver a man into the hands of the Gestapo; a job that involved acts of sabotage, espionage, theft and sometimes even murder.
