Target - Italy - Roderick Bailey

Drawing on long-classified documents, Target: Italy
is the official history of the war waged by Britain's Special
Operations Executive on Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy. It is the
first full account of SOE's clandestine efforts to strike at Italy and
sever its alliance with Nazi Germany, uncovering missions as remarkable
as a plot to assassinate Mussolini and plans to arm the Mafia.

It is also the first in-depth history of SOE's attempts at causing
trouble inside an enemy country as opposed to an enemy-occupied one,
issuing a sobering reminder of the terrible dangers that foreign
agencies can encounter when trying to encourage resistance to powerful
authoritarian regimes.

This is a compelling tale of desperate
daring and sacrifice, climaxing in one of the most extraordinary
episodes of the war: the delicate and dramatic dealings between the
Allies and the Italians that led to Italy's surrender in 1943.