Between Silk and Cyanide

by Leo Marks

  Word spread quickly that someone in SOE was volunteering for extra labour, and my panel practice came of age when Buckmaster asked me to brief two F-section agents named, respectively, Peter and Paul. Feeling like a pill-pusher with Messianic pretensions, I reported to F section’s Orchard Court flat to meet my first pupils.

  Peter’s surname was Churchill – and thanks to a briefing from Owen I knew far more about him than he about me. This slender man, coiled in his chair like a question mark with a moustache, had got into the habit of slipping across to the south of France, usually by submarine and canoe, and staying there as long as Buckmaster and circumstances would permit. I had no idea what Peter’s new mission was but he seemed no more concerned about it than a day tripper with some business on the side. The prospect of the south of France had put him in a holiday mood and it was with some reluctance that he interrupted it for a ‘spot of coding’.

  Within the next five minutes he made as many mistakes. I asked him to stop, which he did with alacrity. I knew that Peter had left Cambridge with a degree in modern languages and the reputation of being one of the finest ice-hockey blues the university had produced. Hoping to establish common ground, I discussed the ‘language of coding’, the rules of its ‘grammar’, the nature of its ‘syntax’. I told him that he ‘spoke coding’ with a bloody awful accent which would give him away, and then switched metaphors. We chose five words of his poem and lined them up as if they were members of his hockey team, and I asked him for both our sakes to remember where the goal was. He skated through two messages without one false pass and was about to try a third when he received a phone call from Buckmaster.

  ‘Yes, Maurice? … Meet who? … His name’s what? …’ (I was sure he could hear but being difficult was a sport for which he’d also won a blue.) ‘But Maurice, I’m still having a hockey lesson from Marks … All right then, if I must.’

  He apologised for having to leave at half-time, promised not to get sent off for foul coding and hurried away.

  I went next door and met my first frightened agent.

  When Paul and I shook hands they needed galoshes. He seemed even more of a refugee from the civil war of adolescence than I was. He was English but spoke French like a native and was due to be dropped into France in a few nights’ time. He showed me a message he’d been working on. He’d found a way to go wrong which not even Skinnarland had thought of. He’d started by encoding his message quite normally, then switched to the process reserved for decoding it – which was like straddling two escalators going in opposite directions. This was after eight weeks of training. I took him through the whole system from beginning to end and he understood it perfectly, which was even more worrying.

  He suddenly asked what would happen if he made ‘a bit of a mistake’ and sent us a message which we couldn’t decode.

  I didn’t want him to know that he’d be dependent on me. I improvised a little and told him that we had a team of girls who’d been specially trained to break indecipherable messages. Each girl, I said, ‘adopted’ an agent so that if he made a mistake or two in his messages, she’d be familiar with his coding style. I then asked him to run through his poem for me and took out his code card to check the wording. He shyly admitted that Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ was his favourite poem and that he was grateful to his instructor for allowing him to use it. He added that he was afraid someone else might have picked it first.

  He was silent for a few moments and then whispered the words – I wasn’t sure to whom:

  Be near me when my light is low,

  When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick

  And tingle; and the heart is sick,

  And all the wheels of being slow.

  Be near me when the sensuous frame

  Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;

  And time, a maniac scattering dust,

  And life, a fury slinging flame.

  Be near me when my faith is dry,

  And men the flies of latter spring,

  That lay their eggs, and sting and sing

  And weave their petty cells and die.

  Be near me when I fade away,

  To point the term of human strife,

  And on the low dark verge of life

  The twilight of eternal day.

  I was careful to keep looking at the code card. There was nothing more that I could say to him. But there was one thing that I could do.

  Without telling anyone, I ordered a car and went to meet the coders of Grendon.

  Every girl in the code room at Station 53 could have walked out of her job at a month’s notice. They were all in the FANY, a volunteer organ-isation whose members could resign at will. The average age of these girls was twenty, though there was a sprinkling amongst them of watchful matriarchs, and most of them had been selected as coders on an arbitrary basis because they happened to be available when coders were wanted. After the briefest training they were despatched to one of the most secret establishments in England and left to get on with it. They were never allowed to meet the agents whose traffic they handled and who were only code names to them. The Gestapo had no more reality for these girls than when they’d joined the FANY.

  As I opened the door of the lecture room, forty of them stood to attention. I wasn’t sure how to get them to sit down again and made a vaguely royal gesture which had no immediate effect. I walked up to the blackboard at the far end of the room, wrote out a message in code which I hoped was legible and turned to face them.

  It was the first time I’d ever given a lecture except to the one or two girls I’d taken out. I wasn’t prepared for their impact en masse.

  I spotted two gigglers at the back of the room and talked only to them for the first five minutes – about agents in the field and the risks they took to send messages to us. I quoted verbatim from a telegram Dansey had shown me only two nights ago about a Yugoslav partisan, eighteen years old, who had been caught with a wireless transmitter, had refused to betray the organiser whose messages he was sending and was eventually taken to the mortuary ‘no longer recognisable as a human being’. They didn’t handle Yugoslav traffic. There was a sudden urgency in that room to handle the Gestapo.

  I asked them to help break the message on the blackboard as if they were the Gestapo; I showed them what enemy cryptographers would look for if they had intercepted the message. I began to anagram and asked them to join in. They were shy at first – but soon suggestions were being called out from all round the room and those from ‘the gigglers’ were amongst the brightest. I reserved them for Paul.

  It was oversimplified, of course, but it gave them the ‘feel’ of code-breaking, and the principles they were shown were absolutely valid.

  I let them finish the message themselves. The clear-text read: ‘From the coders of Grendon to the agents of SOE. THERE SHALL BE NO SUCH THING AS AN INDECIPHERABLE MESSAGE.’

  I knew I would be overloading the girls if I continued but I couldn’t resist it. I wanted them to see how the enemy would now mathematically reconstruct the five words on which the message had been encoded.

  It took them twenty minutes to recover those words but no one could identify the rest of the poem. I spoke it to them in full: ‘ “Be near me when my light is low …”’

  Two days later they sent me a message on the teleprinter: ‘WE HAVE BROKEN OUR FIRST INDECIPHERABLE. THE CODERS OF GRENDON.’

  I sent them a message of congratulations on behalf of all agents. The pilot light in SOE’s code room had started to burn.

  THREE

  A Collector’s Item

  By July ’42 I felt sufficiently at home to rummage through the Top Secret documents on Dansey’s desk while he and Owen were conferring with Ozanne. Remembering that ‘You mustn’t judge a book by its cover’ was not only an agent’s code phrase but a Marks & Co. house rule, I ignored all the Top Secret documents, and selected for my further education an innocuous-looking folder which was lying in an in tray.

  It co
ntained a prime collector’s item: a situation report on the Free French, ‘For Most Limited Distribution Only’. It soon became apparent even to my racing eyes that SOE and de Gaulle were too busy belittling each other’s achievements to learn from each other’s mistakes. The report also made clear that the in-fighting between de Gaulle and SOE had infected our policymakers. They were unanimous that France was the life’s blood of SOE but couldn’t decide whether the formidable Frenchman should be treated as a valued ally or an internal haemorrhage. The sound of Dansey’s footsteps stopped the rush of de Gaulle’s blood to my head.

  The report made no reference to a concession which SOE had made to de Gaulle in the interests of Anglo-French relations. It was a concession which amounted to a licence to lose agents and in the midnight privacy of my cubbyhole I referred to it as ‘the Free French fuck-up’.

  It was otherwise known as General de Gaulle’s secret code.

  Although de Gaulle, when he first occupied London in 1940, had had nothing he could call his own except France, and badly needed wireless facilities to tell her so, he had insisted at the outset of his negotiations with SOE that all Free French agents must be allowed to use a secret French code in addition to the one which SOE would provide.

  Our embryonic organisation, having to fight for its life in the Cabinet as well as in the field, didn’t wish to risk losing the Free French forces without having had a chance to evaluate them, and agreed to the use of a secret French code on one condition: the clear-texts of all messages in this code were to be distributed at once to RF section, which SOE had formed to deal exclusively with the Free French. General de Gaulle gave his undertaking, the principle was established and both sides agreed that there was to be no departure from it.

  SOE then laid on a special drill to implement this decision, which was sufficiently convoluted to keep all parties happy: whenever a message was received from the field with a prefix denoting that it was in secret French code, Station 53 teleprinted it to Dansey’s distribution department – which then passed it to RF section, which then passed it to General de Gaulle’s Duke Street headquarters, which then decoded it and passed it back en clair to RF section – which passed it back to DDD (Dansey’s distribution department) for circulation.

  Conversely, messages to the field were handed over in code to RF section, with the en clair texts, and RF section then passed them to DDD, which then transmitted the code messages to Station 53, which then transmitted them.

  This had become accepted procedure and no one saw the slightest reason to disturb it. Nor had anyone in SOE raised the minor matter of what kind of code the Free French were using. I hoped that they kept it as secret from the Germans as they did from us.

  I watched these messages passing through the code department like distinguished strangers. And what distinguished them more than anything else was that one out of every three was indecipherable. I wasn’t allowed to break them, nudge Duke Street into breaking them or provide any kind of first aid for them whatever.

  They were de Gaulle’s untouchables. And every one of them reduced our battle cry ‘There shall be no such thing as an indecipherable message’ to the level of a good intention.

  Nor did they promote mutual confidence at my briefing sessions with the Free French. It was hard to face the agents knowing that I could help them when they made mistakes in their British code but must look the other way when they made them in their French.

  But, as Dansey firmly and sympathetically pointed out, it was de Gaulle’s code; SOE had agreed to cede all jurisdiction over it, and the decision was irreversible. He advised me, though it had the force of an order, ‘to leave well enough alone’.

  I enquired whether he meant ‘sick enough alone’ and turned to go.

  ‘Keep up the good work,’ he said.

  The only good work I was party to was being done by the coders of Grendon, who regarded an agent’s indecipherable as a personal affront and did their best to scratch its eyes out. They had begun performing with the precision of relay racers and, by passing the baton of indecipherables from one eager shift to another, had succeeded in breaking 80 per cent of them within a few hours.

  The bloody-minded ones which didn’t respond, such as Einar Skinnarland’s, they grudgingly passed on to me.

  I visited the coders as often as I could to suggest quicker ways to the finishing post, to brief them about new agents, and because I enjoyed the illusion of their undivided attention. Unfortunately, during one of these visits I was in the middle of explaining that the Free French were the only agents burdened with a secret code of which de Gaulle allowed us to know nothing and that the strain of having to use two systems caused the agents to send an inordinate number of indecipherables in their British codes, when Ozanne waddled in on a state visit. I immediately stopped referring to a forbidden subject but His Signals Majesty summoned me to his office to declare my interest.

  I explained that indecipherables in secret French code had shot up by an alarming 12 per cent, and that Duke Street seemed to make no effort to break them. I then broke off on compassionate grounds as Ozanne’s complexion had suddenly begun to match the colour of his tabs and I suspected that his blood pressure had shot up by an alarming 100 per cent. He left me in no doubt whatever that if I wished to keep my job I was never again to discuss, question or even think about the secret French code. It was entirely de Gaulle’s business and anyone who didn’t understand this had no place in the Signals directorate. He reminded me that I was there ‘simply to keep an eye on agents’ traffic’, and was kind enough to add that he had heard good reports about me from Pollock and Dansey. He then assured me that if I had any important problems, I could always bring them direct to him.

  A week later a Free French wireless operator was captured by the Gestapo while he was still on the air. He had begun to sign off after transmitting a message 250 letters long with a prefix denoting that it was in secret French code. Duke Street released the text of this message early next morning. It was a repeat of an indecipherable he had sent a week earlier and ended with an apology from the agent for his mistake in coding.

  I waited until Dansey and Owen had left, then locked the door of my office and set about unlocking de Gaulle’s secret code.

  My first step was to select a dozen outgoing messages in secret code, a dozen incoming, and compare them with the en clair texts which Duke Street had sent us.

  This was not an exercise in cryptography. With the facilities at my disposal it was a game of Scrabble played with General de Gaulle’s counters.

  I gave the secret French code the nudge it needed.

  I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, believe the result.

  There was no secret French code. The Free French were passing all their traffic in the British poem-code and disguising it from us by using a secret indicator system.

  Whenever Duke Street and an agent communicated with each other in ‘secret’ French code, they chose five words from their British poem-code and encoded their message in the usual way. The difference was that they used their secret indicator system to inform each other – but conceal from SOE – which words they had chosen.

  Technically it meant that SOE’s fragile poem-codes were being used for two sets of traffic, when they could scarcely stand the strain of one. As an additional side effect, every time an indecipherable was re-encoded in ‘secret’ French code it would be so easy for the interception service to identify that the operator was virtually advertising his whereabouts in neon-lit Morse.

  I could see only one answer to this and set about providing it. I worked out the secret indicator system of every Free French agent and got a timetable from Grendon of their wireless schedules so that I could be ready to decode the secret French traffic the moment it arrived.

  I now had to lay on a special procedure sufficiently simple to avoid arousing suspicion. This was the high-risk part of the operation.

  The teleprinter operators were used to my wandering into their office brooding ov
er indecipherables, thinking up poems or cadging tea. I told the supervisor that Duke Street had been complaining about mutilations in traffic from the field and that, in future, I had to check all incoming messages in secret French code before they were sent to Duke Street. She didn’t question this at all and handed me a message in secret French code which had just come in from Salmon’s operator. I reeled Salmon’s code conventions into the lavatory for maximum priv-acy, looked up his secret French indicator, applied it – found that the message was perfectly encoded, remembered to pull the chain and returned it to the distribution department within ten minutes.

  It was the start of an interception service which I expected to be blown at any moment, but once the drill was established the girls never questioned it.

  As soon as a message was received from the field in ‘secret’ French code, I collected it for ‘checking’ and deciphered it before Duke Street had a chance to see it. If it was properly encoded, it was sent round to them at once. If it turned out to be indecipherable, I broke it as quickly as I could and then re-encoded it accurately in secret French code so that Free French headquarters could read their own traffic. It was at worst only a fringe infringement of de Gaulle’s privacy.

  Fortunately for the resources of a one-man code room the proportion of messages sent in secret French code was small (a little over 5 per cent) and my main problem in handling the traffic was that I was far too careless ever to have offered myself a job. On one humiliating occasion I broke an indecipherable, made a mistake in re-encoding it and sent Duke Street an indecipherable of my own. None of the messages in ‘secret’ French code were operational: they were always confined to political or administrative matters. Why de Gaulle had made such an issue of using this code was none of my business. Being accurate was.