by Leo Marks
Seated at Nick’s desk as if he were there for the duration, the Guru began the most important conversation we were ever likely to have by instructing me to present my ideas as succinctly as possible as he had to leave the office early.
Trying to sound casual, I said that the code department’s contribution to concealing the spiralling volume of our traffic would be to supply the stations with ten thousand dummy code groups a week for transmission round the clock to all parts of Europe. I then reminded him (not because he needed to be reminded but because I liked saying it) that each message would be encoded in a WOK, LOP or poem and would be indistinguishable from our genuine traffic, and stressed that the sooner these dummy transmissions started the better.
The Guru expressed concern about the extra work dummy traffic would cause coders and WT operators.
I replied that I couldn’t answer for the WT operators but I could for the coders and pointed out that to simulate LOP traffic the girls had only to copy out the code groups of a one-time pad, and hand them over for transmission.
But I conceded that simulating WOK and poem-code traffic would be a very different matter: all such messages were the product of double-transposition, and if their code groups didn’t contain the correct proportion of vowels and consonants they’d be recognised as counterfeit. Since we couldn’t devise the texts ourselves, we’d have to rely on the country sections to compose large numbers of dummy messages as if they were genuine, but I doubted if they’d agree to this request without considerable pressure.
The Guru expressed his gratification at the prospect of applying it and undertook to call a meeting of the country-section heads to explain what was required of them.
Glancing at his watch, he announced with a sigh that it was time we dealt with iodoforms. He agreed that it was impossible to dispense with them and was relieved when I admitted that the only suggestion I could make about concealing their growth was to introduce dummy iodoforms immediately.
I added that even though the BBC surrounded our iodoforms with other ‘personal messages’ (some genuine, the rest dummy), there weren’t nearly enough of them and their quantity must be doubled, though it would mean asking for extra air time.
He immediately undertook to contact Major Buxton (our liaison officer with the BBC) to ensure that we got it. He then glanced at his overflowing in tray and silently conveyed that the meeting was over.
But I had bad news for him. ‘There’s just one more problem …’
‘There always is with you. Well? What is it?’
‘A lot of the dummy traffic would have to be Free French.’
‘Well? What of it?’
‘Valois may not like the idea of dummy messages, and his word is law in Duke Street – just as yours is with us. What can we do if he won’t co-operate?’
‘I shall leave Valois to you,’ he announced magnanimously.
He had just enough energy to point to the door.
Passy, Manuel and Valois were all convinced of Valois’s brilliance, and for once I agreed with them completely.
The French wizard and I had had no further disputes since he’d stopped needing secret code prefixes, though he still believed that the outcome of the signals war depended on radios and signal plans, with codes bringing up the rear, preferably someone else’s. It would be the first time we’d met without Kay Moore having to act as our interpreter (his English was on a par with my French), but I knew that if we didn’t speak the same language now we never would.
He rose from behind a desk even more cluttered than mine, and I had no difficulty in understanding his opening remark. ‘Ah, Tommee,’ he said, and shook his head sadly.
I accepted a cup of his atrocious coffee and thanked him for seeing me at such short notice, but we had a ‘très important problem que the deux of us must discutez’.
He appeared to get the drift of this. ‘Problème, Monsieur Marks? Quel problème? What is it?’
I expounded ‘le problème de our growing traffic et le need pour dummy messages’ as succinctly as I could, but five minutes later caught him looking at me in such total bewilderment that I was about to telephone Kay Moore for assistance when something in his eyes stopped me.
Shaking his head as if to remove the droppings of my pidgin French, he explained in Valois English that he’d been thinking of telephoning me to suggest dummy traffic but wasn’t sure how I’d respond.
I accepted another cup of coffee because it was suddenly delicious, and we spent the next hour discussing ‘le problème’, which we approached from completely different viewpoints.
Many of his ideas for misleading the enemy, such as using variable frequencies at irregular intervals with identical call-signs, were completely beyond me, and mine for making some messages look easy to break meant little to him. But one thing was clear to both of us: we were speaking the same language. We were both convinced that the dummy traffic should start as soon as possible, and he promised that his Duke Street colleagues would provide suitable texts.
I didn’t know the French for ‘keep stumm’ but had no difficulty in convincing him that the less we said to our respective chiefs about our little tricks the better. He also agreed that to facilitate our phone calls we should give the dummy traffic a code name only he and I would know. I tried to persuade him to choose one but he insisted on leaving the code name to me.
I remembered his opening remark. ‘How about calling it “R. Tommee”?’ I suggested.
It was unanimously adopted.
On 26 March we learned that Tommy had been transferred to Fresnes prison.
Perhaps it was coincidence, but later that night we transmitted our first batch of ‘R. Tommee’ messages.
SIXTY-FIVE
‘The life that I have’
One of the most novel experiences in SOE was to receive a phone call from a country-section head admitting he was wrong, but Maurice Buckmaster phoned on 23 March and apologised to me for ‘making another gaffe’.
He admitted that he’d mistakenly believed that one of his trainee agents, who’d been taught codes at training school, would have no use for them whatever when she reached the field, and he’d excluded her from the list of agents due for refresher courses in London. Her code name was Louise, and she was to have been dropped into France in mid-March with Maurice Southgate to act as his courier, but their drop had been postponed until April because of the weather.
He and Southgate had since decided it might be useful if Louise could use encoded messages in an emergency. Could she possibly be given a refresher course immediately, and would I give her a final code briefing as soon as I could?
I agreed to send an instructress to Orchard Court within the next ten minutes and to give Louise a final briefing later in the week.
He phoned again the next morning to thank me for the instructress and to say he’d made another mistake. Louise might not be in London for more than a couple of days. Could I possibly give her a final briefing at once?
Although I was used to briefing his women agents (they included Noor, Odette and an Australian boomerang named Nancy Wake), I was still uneasy in their presence and needed adequate warning to practise growing up, but Maurice pressed me for an answer and I reluctantly agreed to see Louise in an hour.
I then remembered that most women agents seemed slightly more approachable when I addressed them by their real names, and I asked him what hers was.
‘Violette Szabo,’ he said, and hung up to take another call.
According to her instructress’s report, Violette had no problems with her WOK but was careless with her poem-code and seemed unable to number her transposition keys without making mistakes. More practice was recommended.
I stood outside Orchard Court for ten minutes to sharpen my inner ear and convince myself that the code war’s only problem was helping Louise, then opened the door of the briefing room.
A dark-haired slip of mischief rose from behind a desk which Noor had once occupied, held out her hand a
nd smiled.
It seemed inappropriate for the head of Codes to mark the occasion by singing ‘Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise’, so I shook her hand in silence.*
Resuming her seat, she picked up a WOK which was lying in front of her and declared the proceedings open. ‘I like this code,’ she said, ‘but Colonel Buckmaster thinks it won’t be safe for me to carry it. I had such a good place to hide it, too.’ She had a cockney accent, which added to her impishness.
Professor Higgins instructed Eliza Doolittle to encode a WOK message at least a hundred letters long.
She complied at once (everything about her was immediate, especially her impact) and I watched her covertly, though I suspected she knew it.
She was the first agent whose exact age I wanted to know (she was clearly in her early twenties), and I wondered what this had to do with the job in hand and what my inner ear was up to.
She finished encoding her message in under twenty minutes (which put her in Knut Haugland’s class if she’d enciphered it correctly), and I picked it up to check it.
‘Oops sorry,’ she said. She then snatched it back and inserted her security checks (she had to change her printed indicator groups by adding one to every first letter and four to every third).
Our hands touched as she returned the message, and I was tempted to say ‘Oops sorry’ for what I was thinking. I tried to concentrate on her message.
It was flawlessly encoded, and contained two hundred letters instead of the minimum of one hundred I’d stipulated (the only other agent to have enciphered more letters than strictly necessary was Knut Haugland). It was also in a mixture of English and French, a security precaution most trainees forgot, and she’d signed off ‘that’s all for now’ (even experienced agents still clung to ‘message ends’). Her dummy letters didn’t contain a single ‘X’ or ‘Z’ and seemed on the verge of spelling a swear word. I realised that she was intelligent as well as quick-witted and said a silent prayer that she wasn’t also telepathic.
I warned her that she must cut away the keys from her silk as soon as she’d used them.
‘I don’t think I could – silk is so expensive.’
‘So is a captured agent if her back traffic can be read.’
She promised that she’d will herself to do it.
I then asked her to encode a message in her poem and to make sure it contained at least two hundred letters.
She took a deep breath, then wrote out five words from her poem as if each one soiled the paper and proceeded to number them.
I glanced at her code card. Her poem was in French and seemed to be a nursery rhyme based on ‘Three Blind Mice’.
She certainly behaved like one as she scurried from letter to letter trying to number her key phrase. She finally succeeded, and thirty minutes later handed me her message for checking. It was exactly two hundred letters long.
I handed it back without making contact and asked her to decode it herself. I knew it was indecipherable long before I heard her muttering something in French which was considerably more substantial than ‘Oops sorry’.
‘It won’t come out.’ She looked at me in despair. ‘Why do I keep making mistakes?’
She thumped her forehead: ‘Pourquoi, pourquoi, pourquoi?’
I asked her to encode a second message while I tried to find out pourquoi.
‘But I’m taking up so much of your time.’
‘I’ve got all day,’ I said. And hoped that I’d need it.
‘If I get it wrong this time I’ll …’ She finished the sentence in French, then snatched up her pencil and began her new assault while I examined the indecipherable.
She’d misspelt one of the five words she’d chosen from her poem, which threw out the whole of her transposition key. I waited until Little Miss Skinnarland had finished her new message and pointed out what she’d done.
‘But the code’s so easy. Why can’t I get it right?’ She thrust her new effort at me without waiting for an answer, but I again insisted that she decoded it herself.
A pounding on the desk announced the result. ‘I’ve done it again. It won’t come out.’
Her pencil snapped in two and her face snapped with it from the weight of self-disgust.
I took the message from her before she could tear it up and rapidly checked it. ‘You’ve misspelt your poem again. “Trois” should have an “s” on it.’
She muttered something like ‘C’est pas possible’ and looked at me despairingly. ‘If Colonel Buckmaster hears about this he may not let me go in.’
‘He won’t hear about it because we’re going to get it right.’
‘But how?’
A sensible question. Her only mistakes had been to misspell the words of her poem and she’d done this consistently. Since Freud believed that all mistakes were unconsciously motivated and I believed Freud, I wondered if she were reacting against the poem because it had unconscious associations for her.
Professor Dr Sigmund Marks asked whether she’d chosen it herself or whether the training school had issued it to her.
‘I chose it. It’s a nursery rhyme I learned at school and I know it backwards. Why?’
I explained that some agents who were otherwise good coders often made spelling mistakes in their key phrases, and we’d found that they weren’t really happy with their poems, though they didn’t always know why.
She considered the matter carefully. ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way.’ Her expression was troubled, and she seemed to have left Orchard Court for some childhood briefing room.
She returned a few moments later to the poem-bound present. ‘I shouldn’t have chosen it. I couldn’t spell it as a child, and I still can’t … I’d like to change it but I suppose it’s too late.’
‘Do you know any others?’
‘They’re all nursery rhymes, and I’d feel so stupid if I used one – I know I would … Look, let me try another message …’
‘How about trying another poem?’
‘Could I?’
‘Are you a quick learner?’
‘I am at some things, but they’re nothing to do with codes.’
The imp was back and looked at me appealingly. ‘Do you know a poem you’d like me to try?’
For the first time since Xmas Eve I thought of the words which had occurred to me on the roof of Norgeby House. I wrote them in block capitals on a sheet of squared paper and checked the spelling before handing them over.
I then did what I could to descend from the roof.
An aircrash or two later I heard a tiny intake of breath and turned to look at her. She was speaking the words to herself, and I felt I was intruding on her privacy.
She finally looked up at me. ‘I could learn this in a few minutes. I promise you I could.’
‘You’re sure you want to?’
‘Oh yes. Oh yes. I almost know it now.’
‘Well then … take those few minutes, then encode two messages in it. I’ll come back this time tomorrow and go through them with you.’
She promised she’d be ready.
At least I had a good reason for seeing her again.
She stood up when I entered the briefing room, waiting until I was seated opposite her, then made a simple statement of fact:
The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours.
The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.
A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause.
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.
It was she who broke the silence. ‘Who wrote this?’
‘I’ll check up, and let you know when you come back.’
I had a gut feeling that she wasn’t going to and busied myself checking the two messages
she’d encoded. Each was three hundred letters long, and there wasn’t a single mistake in either.
Not knowing if she’d been up all night encoding them, I asked her to encode another message in front of me. ‘Two hundred letters will be enough.’
She set to work at once, and produced a two-hundred-letter message in under fifteen minutes. It was perfectly encoded.
I congratulated her, finalised her security checks and reminded her to cut away the keys of her silk. I wasn’t sure how to say, ‘That’s all for now,’ because for me it certainly wasn’t, but she solved the problem.
‘I’ve got a present for you.’ She fumbled in her handbag and produced a miniature chess set, which she said she’d won at a shooting gallery.* Holding it out shyly, she said she thought that people who invented codes were sure to play chess and she’d like me to have it for all the help I’d given her.
I tried to thank her for giving me a first edition of Caxton’s Game and Playe of Chesse (which was how it felt), but she gently interrupted to say that she was late for an appointment with Vera Atkins, who wanted to check everything she was taking in with her.
I told her I looked forward to playing chess with her when she returned from France, and she said she’d like that too, as it would give her time to learn it.
I unlocked the special drawer in my desk and put her chess set between my other prize possessions: Rabinovitch’s photograph of Joe Louis’s left hook and Tommy’s cigar.
I then surrendered the words of the poem to Muriel, as they’d formally become a code.
I didn’t think Ruth would mind.
Notes
* This song, which Maurice Chevalier made famous in the early thirties, was Archambault’s reserve poem. Several other agents had asked permission to use it, but it was a first come, first disserved.
* I also discovered that she was the deadliest shot her training school had yet encountered. Since she rarely had enough money to buy cigarettes she used to win them at shooting galleries.