In July 1998, the British Public Record Office declassified a 20-page dossier locked away for over half a century: a step-by-step blueprint for assassinating Adolf Hitler. This episode sifts through Operation Foxley and the wartime doctrine of the Special Operations Executive, formed to set Europe ablaze, to understand how British intelligence solved the tactical puzzle of killing Hitler in 1944, and why the trigger was never pulled.

The plan grew from Churchill’s 1941 authorization to target Nazi leadership, the 1942 proof of concept in Operation Anthropoid against Reinhard Heydrich, and failed ideas about bombing Hitler’s armored train, until a June 1944 tip to the SOE desk in Algiers and a German POW captured in Normandy, a former Berghof guard, revealed that Hitler took a solitary 20-minute walk every morning just after 10 a.m. from the residence to the tea house on Mooslahnerkopf hill, deliberately out of sight of his own sentries.

• Why the train bombing was impossible: stations learned of Hitler’s arrival only minutes beforehand, creating an intelligence vacuum the SOE could not lay a trap inside
• The Nazi flag hoisted in a nearby town whenever Hitler was in residence, visible from a local cafe, as the operation’s visual trigger
• The rejected water-poisoning plot, and why the SOE trusted anti-Nazi Salzburg shopkeeper Heidenthaler as a smuggler but not an insider on the train
• The armory: a silenced 9mm Luger for sentries and guard dogs, now displayed in Maldon, Essex, and a British-tuned Kar98k with a Mauser scope, carried by operatives disguised as Gebirgsjager mountain troops
• Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Thornley’s argument that Hitler’s battlefield incompetence made him an Allied asset, the fear of martyrdom and a new stab-in-the-back myth, and how Hitler’s July 14, 1944 departure from the Berghof and the July 20 bomb plot closed the window forever