Between Silk and Cyanide

by Leo Marks

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  The Major Development

  Nick was alone in his office except for the shadow of Giskes, and didn’t look up as I hurried towards him (at one in the morning he couldn’t be blamed for it).

  He was studying a Top Secret folder, which he suddenly put face downwards on the desk as if tempted to join it. My Dutch reports were in front of him, and one of them was open, though I couldn’t see at which page. I put the black coffee beside them.

  Finally glancing up at me, he wasted no time on preliminaries. ‘According to a report just in from Switzerland, the greater part of the Dutch Resistance is in enemy hands.’

  Clearing his throat as if his career were lodged there, he instructed me not to interrupt him till he’d finished giving me the details. He then disclosed that Sprout (Pieter Dourlein) and Chive (Ben Ubbrinck) had escaped from Haaren prison on 30 August and had arrived in Switzerland two days ago. They’d at once reported to the Dutch military attaché and informed him, and subsequently the British consul, that the Germans had been waiting to arrest them when they landed in Holland (Chive in November ’42; Sprout in March ’43). They’d then supplied details of the dozens of other SOE agents in Haaren prison.

  Pausing to comment that the coffee was even better than he remembered it, he proceeded to disclose the consequences of their arrival in Switzerland.

  The head of C’s Berne Station at once sent a message to his London HQ stating that the Germans knew all about SOE’s codes, WT procedures and passwords, and were regularly exchanging traffic with London over dozens of captured sets.

  C’s controllers in London then transmitted a warning to their chief agents in Holland, which Nick quoted verbatim from his Top Secret folder, a sure sign that it was well past his bedtime: ‘ “Sister service totally infiltrated by Germans. We therefore urge you to break off all contact with their agents and keep clear of them. Please warn OD [Dutch Intelligence] and other organisations.”’

  I thanked God for C’s existence but kept the heresy private.

  Nick’s next comment was so unexpected that I had to ask him to repeat it.

  ‘We must consider the possibility that the escape’s been engineered by the Germans.’

  He pointed out that Trumpet had sent two messages in September warning London that Sprout and Chive had been captured by the Gestapo, who’d turned them round and helped them to escape so that they could spread disinformation.

  Before I could protest, he added that there was another reason for doubting their story. A cargo ship had recently been blown up in Amsterdam harbour, which could hardly have happened if the entire Dutch Resistance was in enemy hands.

  At which point I also blew up. Pointing to my reports, I said that if they were worth anything at all then Trumpet was completely blown, and when I’d read his denunciation of Sprout and Chive I’d regarded it as a guarantee of their bona fides. As for the destruction of the cargo ship, surely this was yet another example of Giskes at his best? ‘For God’s sake, Nick … surely SOE isn’t still allowing itself to be taken in?’

  I rarely called him Nick to his face but it wasn’t that which caused him to go scarlet with annoyance.

  He said that he didn’t object to seeing Giskes’s hand in the explosion: it was a sound basic principle. But he took the strongest objection to being interrupted before he’d finished explaining exactly why he’d sent for me.

  I apologised and waited.

  He then began building towards his climax, and I slowly understood his reluctance to reach it.

  He said that C was using the situation to discredit SOE at the highest level, and the War Office was about to order us to discontinue all activities in Holland, Belgium and Denmark, and wherever possible to withdraw our personnel. He thought that SOE would be able to resist these orders, but a far more serious threat was being posed by the chief of air staff.

  The RAF had been refusing to fly sorties over Holland since May and had curtailed operations over Belgium, but as a result of the latest disaster the whole of SOE’s air operations were being reviewed.

  The crux of the review was the security of SOE’s communications, and in particular its codes. The RAF needed to be satisfied that our communications wouldn’t cause unnecessary loss of aircraft between now and D-Day, and on D-Day itself. For this purpose a senior RAF officer named Air Commodore Payne was to visit SOE. Nick would show him the latest wireless equipment and WT procedures. I was to show him the new codes.

  Draining the last of his coffee, he stressed that the competence of the Signals directorate was the real issue at stake and that the scale of SOE’s future operations would depend on the air commodore’s findings. He added that I’d be alone with him for as long as it took and that he was certain to ask me some searching questions, especially about Holland. ‘You must answer them fully.’

  He looked hard at me with an expression I couldn’t fathom and seemed about to add something, but changed his mind at the last moment and yawned instead. ‘You’d better get some sleep,’ he said. ‘He’ll be here at ten o’clock.’

  Halfway home I realised what had been missing from the briefing: I hadn’t been instructed not to produce my Dutch reports. Had he forgotten to injunct me? Or was he relying on me to use my initiative and show them without consent?

  Was that why I was being allowed to see the air commodore by himself?

  I fell asleep wondering.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  ‘If I should die, et cetera’

  On the morning of 30 November Air Commodore Payne, Nick and Heffer held a conference in Nick’s office. An hour later an unusually ruffled Heffer warned me on the telephone that our visitor had been ‘got at’ by C and seemed already to have decided that SOE’s air ops must be cancelled. He instructed me to show him our new codes ‘down to the last detail’ and not to let him ruffle me.

  Ten minutes later the air commodore taxied across the runway which led to my desk, and I found myself staring into eyes full of dead pilots.

  Even while Nick was introducing us, he looked round the office as if annoyed that it was still functioning and silently conveyed that in his opinion SOE’s Signals directorate was solely responsible for the collapse of the Dutch Resistance and the loss of God knows how many aircrews and aircraft.

  We were alone ten seconds later and tacitly agreed to become old enemies.

  ‘Coffee, sir?’

  Shaking his head abruptly, he said he understood from Brigadier Nicholls that I knew the purpose of his visit.

  To ground us, you bastard.

  Without waiting for my reply, which was possibly just as well, he glared at the silks which I’d lovingly arrayed on the table beside him. ‘I’m not here to be fobbed off with SOE’s new codes. I want to see every system you’ve been using for the past two years! In detail!’

  At this stage I stopped thinking of him as Air Commodore Payne and nicknamed him PITA (Pain in the Arse), a) because he was one and b) because it would help me to forget how much depended on the outcome of this meeting.

  I began my PITA-patter with the poem-code, stressing that we’d inherited it from C and that it was the greatest of their many disservices. ‘It gives the agents no chance, sir. Their poems can be tortured out of them and their back traffic read … which is why we’ve introduced new codes which—’

  ‘One system at a time, thank you.’

  He then asked how much reliance the country sections placed on the poem-code’s security checks.

  ‘Far too much, sir. And so did the former head of Signals because he knew they came from C.’

  This angered him. ‘I’m not concerned with where the damn things came from but with the damage they do. There must be dozens of captured agents setting up dropping operations, and you people in London have no means of knowing they’re in enemy hands.’

  I replied that with the exception of certain territories this was undoubtedly true, which was why we’d introduced—

  ‘Stop there.’

&n
bsp; My heart nearly did.

  ‘Which territories?’

  I told him that I was referring to Norway and Denmark, where the circuits were so tightly structured that if an agent were caught it would be known at once to the rest of his group, who’d report it to London immediately.

  ‘That’s an operational matter, not cryptographic. Are you qualified to assess it?’

  C had done a good job on PITA.

  ‘There’s only one thing I’m qualified to do, sir – and that’s to show you how we try to protect agents and aircraft from C’s concept of a safe code. It would take me twenty minutes, and it would be a great help if you’d point out anything we’ve neglected.’

  He stared disdainfully at my ashtray, where last night’s cigar was almost as stubbed out as I was, then pressed a button on his stopwatch. This was clearly a signal for the crash course to begin, though I’d had no chance to structure it.

  ‘Would you mind telling me your favourite poem, sir?’

  This took him aback, though not far enough. ‘WHY?’

  ‘So that you can encode a short message as part of your crash course.’

  ‘My favourite poem, eh?’ He mused for a moment, then admitted he wasn’t a ‘poetry wallah’ but believed his favourite was Rupert Brooke’s ‘If I should die, et cetera.’

  I invited him to choose five words from it, and he asked me to remind him how the damn thing went.

  Sensing that he knew it by heart, I declined to prompt him.

  He then began reciting the poem like a schoolboy who hasn’t done his homework:

  ‘If I should die,

  Think only this of me:

  That there’s some corner

  Of a foreign field

  That is for ever England.

  And there shall be

  In that rich something

  A richer something concealed …

  Washed by the something,

  And blest by the et cetera …’

  He added that Brooke had also written,

  Stands the Church clock at ten to three?

  And is there honey still for tea?

  He’d apparently forgotten that I’d asked him to pick five words, and I had no intention of reminding him.

  ‘Any five words?’

  ‘Yes, sir; they don’t have to be consecutive.’

  ‘ “Think only this of me”,’ he said promptly.

  At this point I wondered how much PITA really understood about codes, as he had been sent by the RAF to evaluate them, and decided to set a small trap for him. ‘Please turn those five words into a transposition key.’

  I shoved some squared paper up his runway and awaited developments.

  He at once whipped out his fountain pen and numbered his chosen phrase as if he were issuing a cheque which no one dared bounce. I hadn’t had to show him how to do it.

  But I did have to remind him to encode a short message.

  ‘It’ll be short all right.’

  He set about the encoding without any help from me and delivered the result with a flip of his forefinger.

  His message consisted of five Latin words, and his expression made clear that a dead language reflected his opinion of SOE’s traffic.

  I resolved to look up the meaning of Ne supra crepidum suter judicaret the moment he’d gone, and regretted spending my Latin lessons trying to devise codes.

  He looked at me impatiently. ‘If I understand you correctly, because you tend to mumble, my crash course will last twenty minutes. You’ve fourteen left.’

  The telephone rang, although I’d given strict instructions that I wanted no calls until the RAF had taken off. It was from the supervisor at 53a with news she didn’t think could wait. The station had received its first indecipherable in a WOK, and the girls couldn’t break it.

  It had been transmitted by Brossolette’s WT in good atmospheric conditions so the fault must lie in the coding, but a hundred ‘routine attempts’ had failed to produce clear-text and the girls didn’t know what to try next.

  I called out a string of suggestions to the supervisor and instructed her to teleprint the code groups to London so that the Norgeby House coders could help with the blanket attack. I then telephoned Tommy and assured him that we were giving Brossolette’s indecipherable absolute priority. I’d forgotten about PITA and found him looking at me with slightly less than his usual disdain.

  Adjusting his stopwatch, he magnanimously announced that since the call was obviously important, the five minutes twenty seconds I’d spent on it wouldn’t be deducted from the rest of his course. He then made some rapid notes on the pad in front of him and underlined them.

  I was convinced they had something to do with indecipherables and pointed out that if he had no faith in anything else he was told today, he could have it in the girls’ ability to break them.

  He didn’t actually call me a bloody liar but his sceptical expression required immediate attention, and I remembered just in time that three months ago Nick had shown me an astringent memo from the Air Ministry to SOE which I’d done my best to forget as it was an insult to the coders. The memo reminded our RAF liaison officer that it was essential for pilots to be given last-minute information from the field before taking off and that if they were deprived of it because of indecipherables they had to ‘fly blind’, which resulted in heavy casualties. The memo also warned SOE that if key information were delayed on D-Day the consequences to the RAF would be even more serious.

  To stop PITA brooding when I needed his full attention, I explained how blanket attacks worked, and assured him that the girls’ 90 per cent success rate would be even higher by D-Day and that their roundthe-clock dedication to breaking indecipherables was only the fringe of their achievements.

  As a gesture of goodwill, I then made what he clearly regarded as an indecent proposal. ‘Would you care to inspect our FANYs, sir?’

  ‘God forbid,’ he exclaimed.

  At which point I realised that I had only twelve minutes in which to finish his course.

  Snatching up his coded message, I blurted out that if the Germans broke it they’d reconstruct his key phrase, ‘Think only this of me’. They’d then identify its source and be able to read the rest of his message without further effort. I added that, to make their task harder, we tried to persuade agents to use original compositions which couldn’t be looked up in reference books as they’d been written in Baker Street.

  He looked at me in astonishment. ‘Original compositions? – Do you mean to tell me that you people in SOE write poetry?’

  ‘We do other things as well, sir.’

  ‘I’m well aware of them,’ he snapped.

  He then announced that he wanted to see some specimens – ‘now, if you please’.

  Since writing bad poetry could hardly be used as a reason for grounding us, I pointed to the ditty-box without disclosing that I was its sole contributor. ‘They’re all in there, sir, waiting for customers.’

  He reached into the box and chose two at random.

  I recognised the first from its spacing and remembered feeling that I’d lost my own at the time of writing it:

  I searched the pages

  Now blank

  The drawers

  Now empty

  The pictures

  Now faded

  The rooms

  Now rooms

  And nothing more

  But could not find my life

  I found only wood

  In the forest

  Only water

  In the sea

  Only sand

  On the beach

  I could not find me.*

  PITA started his second poem without comment and read it with such total disbelief that I suspected he’d picked one of a dozen which were so pornographic that I’d typed them myself. He reread it as if he now had the confirmation he needed that SOE was an obscenity.

  I tried to convince him that the use of sexual imagery made a valuable contribution to the cod
e war because it was hard for the Germans to anticipate and easy for the agents to memorise, and that we only issued erotica to those whose minds it wouldn’t cause to wander. I added that anything which helped to delay the reconstruction of a poem increased an agent’s lifespan.

  To my astonishment he replaced the poem and selected two more.

  I realised too late that C had guided his hand to a batch of poems which I was equally reluctant for him to see.

  I’d marked the poems ‘UFA’ (unsuitable for agents). I used them once a fortnight to convince the girls that the Germans could reconstruct any code-poem provided they had sufficient specimens of it. I’d composed the UFA he was reading after listening to the traitor Lord Haw-Haw (William Joyce) extolling the virtues of the Führer on Berlin radio:

  His first few goose-steps

  Were no damn use steps

  And his opening Heils

  Gave his mother piles

  For he was still in her womb

  When he began campaigning

  For Lebensraum

  As she felt him growing

  His mum couldn’t help knowing

  That she was housing

  A rabble-rousing

  Frenetic anti-Semitic peripatetic

  Not even the strongest emetic

  Could dislodge

  When he finally crossed the border

  In physical good order

  He could hardly have been littler

  But grew up to be Hitler.

  I’d pencilled the last verse in the margin as it had occurred as an afterthought:

  Although the sperm

  Which created him

  Hated him

  It elated him.

  A bemused PITA then turned to the second UFA as if it couldn’t be worse than the first and discovered how wrong he was:

  She spent her hours

  Breast-feeding flowers

  Fearful of rabies

  From the lips of babies

  Her terror of skin

  And what sheltered within