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Marks wrote an interesting book (though not a particularly exciting one, it is cryptography after all) on his wartime experiences called "Between Silk and Cyanide." The biggest danger of the codes was not that they helped the Germans find agents but that they made it easier to play them after they were caught, sometimes causing agents and supplies to be dropped on waiting Germans. Holland in particular was a defeat for the SOE. The book "Killing of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich" by Callum MacDonald gives a good example of how hard it was to operate in occupied Europe and how inadequate the training was, even though the agents sent into Czechoslovakia were recently departed natives.
The vast, overwhelming majority of those who fought against the Nazis were Christians (or perhaps atheists in the case of the USSR), not Jews, and certainly not Muslims. The kumbayah factor here is ridiculous.

'Marks wrote an interesting book (though not a particularly exciting one, it is cryptography after all) on his wartime experiences called "Between Silk and Cyanide."'

I started the book with great excitement (Marks has always been a hero of mine), but was bored to death by it. It wasn't the story which bothered me so much as the turgid prose.

By the way, in case you weren't aware (I'm not sure that the book mentions it), Marks' father was the bookseller from the famous book by Helen Hanff, 84 Charing Cross Road:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140143505/103-3117042-7275030?v=glance&n=283155

Which was made in to a movie:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090570/

The book "Killing of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich" by Callum MacDonald gives a good example of how hard it was to operate in occupied Europe.

I just finished John Keegan's book on The Second World War, and he makes essentially the same point you do -- for all the super-human bravery of the people involved with this work, it was mostly difficult or impossible to operate in Nazi-occupied Europe. Many operatives were parachuted in to Germans who were waiting for them when they landed, because the clandestine groups had been so thoroughly penetrated.

The British were able to do something similar in England -- the Nazis thought they had operatives in the UK, but all of them had been discovered, and the "information" they provided was bogus.

Keegan says the far less glamorous work of the chairborne cryptoanalyst, who could break codes, had a far great impact on the war.