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. Bad beginning 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. Meanwhile, SOE was training Dutch agents to infiltrate into the Netherlands to help a fledgling resistance movement. The agents complained about the deficiencies of their training program. They were given clothing easily identifiable as British to be worn in the Netherlands, security was lax and SOE could not provide the agents in training with names and addresses of contacts and safe houses that they would need in the Netherlands. In response, the British confined the disaffected trainees and released them only in December 1941 after a complaint by the Dutch government-in-exile in England, and the agents signed a agreement to remain silent about their complaints. SOE's first two Dutch agents, wireless operator Huub Lauwers and saboteur Thys Taconis, parachuted into the Netherlands on the night of 6/7 November 1941. Lauwers was captured on 6 March 1942. He was persuaded to send messages to SOE in London, but he omitted from the messages the two security checks (deliberate errors) that were required to be introduced into messages by the sending agent, the scheme for which was known only to the agent and SOE. The presence of security checks in messages indicated that the sender was the legitimate agent and was acting under free will. The absence of security checks represented a vitally-important duress code, which should have warned SOE that the sender was either an impostor or a legitimate agent who had been captured and coerced into working for the Nazis. Repeatedly ignoring the significance of the absent security checks was a serious violation of the SOE's own transmission protocol. However, SOE London ignored the absence of the security checks and accepted the messages as genuine. Lauwers continued to transmit messages without the security checks and even inserted the letters CAU and GHT ("Caught") at the beginning