Listening in on others?

I know there is a language institute not too far from me that opened before WWII that was geared towards learning different languages to spy on various people. Was anyone involved in such a language institute before sent over to the war for spying? I am curious how much was "on the job training" and how much was learned previously. If you were not a spy, did you know any personally? (Could also be much later in life).

 

SOE more often than not used people from the Nation in question as radio operators I believe. Especially in Norway & France. Using Lysander Aircraft, Agents were inserted & extracted with the aid of the local resistance networks. The Germans knew that this was happening and would always try to locate the radio operators using special detection vans to triangulate their location. Thus Radio Operators would always move to a new location often or risk the chance of being caught by the Gestapo.

 

That is what I assumed to begin with; however, through the years I have met people who have either taught these skills or worked as a translator in some capacity and they were not local to the area. I suppose I should have asked more questions when I knew them well enough to ask :ahg:

 

Where Nationals of the Country involved could not be used then SOE would recruit the best person for the job. Quite often this would involve good language skills. So not always necessarily a person of that Nationality. Unfortunately a lot of good people were captured and killed whilst on these clandestine missions and some suffered horribly at the hands of the Gestapo.