by Leo Marks
SIXTY-SIX
April Fool’s Day
Like all organisations riddled with the stress which they were trying to inflict on others, SOE was full of practical jokers (some of them aware of it) and on 1 April I was relieved to discover that I was sufficiently well regarded to be targeted as an April fool.
That was my first impression when I received an urgent call on the scrambler from Ken Howell (chief signalmaster at 53b), who was anxious to read a message to me which had just been received from Holland in plain language over the Heck/Blue set.
By the end of the first sentence I realised that the catch in his voice was unlikely to be confected as he was neither an actor nor a politician, and I listened in silence till he’d finished.
I then asked him to read it again and teleprint the message to London.
MESSRS BLUNT,* BINGHAM AND SUCCS LTD., LONDON.
IN THE LAST TIME YOU ARE TRYING TO MAKE BUSINESS IN THE NETHERLANDS WITHOUT OUR ASSISTANCE STOP WE THINK THIS RATHER UNFAIR IN VIEW OUR LONG AND SUCCESSFUL CO-OPERATION AS YOUR SOLE AGENTS STOP BUT NEVER MIND WHENEVER YOU WILL COME TO PAY A VISIT TO THE CONTINENT YOU MAY BE ASSURED THAT YOU WILL BE RECEIVED WITH SAME CARE AND RESULT AS ALL THOSE YOU SENT US BEFORE STOP SO LONG
1 April 1944, sent on HECK/BLUE set.
The identical message had been transmitted by ten other agents, including Ebenezer, Parsnip, Turnip and Beetroot. 53b had acknowledged four of them but on Heffer’s instructions had ignored the rest.
I learned from Muriel (queen of the grapevine) that Nick had walked into his office and that a copy of Giskes’s message (he had no need to sign it) was waiting on his desk.
I realised what a bastard I was for feeling even a moment’s elation at being proved right, but this wasn’t the moment to dwell on my more endearing characteristics. It was time to concentrate on Giskes’s, and I compiled a list of questions, knowing that only he could answer most of them.
What did he gain by confirming over ten channels that we were kaput in Holland when he must know that even we would realise that our Belgian escape routes must also be blown and that many Belgian agents were under arrest?
Had he decided that London was so suspicious of him that there was no longer any point in trying to deceive us? If so, what had caused him to make this decision?
Was it the cessation of dropping operations? Or the arrival in London of Ubbrinck and Dourlein? Or the impossibility of answering N section’s questions?
Was his message designed to discredit SOE with the Chiefs of Staff? Or had he sent it for career considerations? Was it better for him in the eyes of his superiors to cease contact with us before we broke it off with him?
As for Signals, had he learned of the existence of WOKs and LOPs and realised that London’s indecipherable to Boni (Plan Giskes) was a trap he’d walked into?
Had he learned of the exchange of ‘Heil Hitler’ call-signs?
I looked up to find Nick watching me from the doorway. He said that he wanted to talk to me as soon as he’d finished a council meeting. Although his eyes watered so frequently that we referred to him as Niagara Nick, I was certain that the liquid trickling down his nose was caused by defective vision concerning Holland.
I realised that the more time I wasted, the greater Giskes’s triumph would be, and resumed my efforts to prepare for D-Day.
On the night of 5 April Violette and Maurice Southgate boarded a Lysander and landed near Rouen on the morning of the 6th.
It would be Ruth’s first trip to France.
Note
* The name Blunt had been used by Major Blizzard as a pseudonym when he was head of N section.
SIXTY-SEVEN
The New Boys
By mid-April the Americans were communicating so freely with us, and we with them, that it was hard to believe we were allies. Until exposed to them in bulk, all I really knew about their mother country was that it contained many of 84’s best customers, and that Spencer Tracy (the finest actor I’d seen apart from Heffer in a hurry) was born there.
But the OSS were a nostalgic lot, and after a series of late-night sessions with them I could have gone shopping in New York, or brothel-hunting in LA, and knew where to find an honest game of bridge in Washington.
On less serious matters, they were appalled to learn of our acute shortage of silk and had promised to deliver large quantities from the States, ‘even if it meant stripping Mae West’s tits’. The first consignment had already arrived.
An even more welcome surprise was their ability to run their own wireless station (53c), with Americans manning the radio sets and a FANY-staffed room, which was controlled by an assiduous young captain named Phoenix.
None of us believed that the new boys would be capable of taking over the Scandinavian traffic from 53b without serious consequences, but throughout the two months in which they’d been handling it not a single SOE agent had suffered from their inexperience. Nor had any of the FANYs who’d queued up to be exposed to it.
Our joint Jedburgh operations would be their ultimate test, as the traffic would be handled entirely by them and they’d have only their own mistakes to learn from.
One of our few remaining reservations was their concept of security. They may have been teasing us (one of their favourite relaxations) but a rumour had reached Nick that they’d invited Time Magazine to visit 53c and photograph its interior. Believing them capable of any indiscretion provided it was great enough, he’d gently informed them that although he had nothing against the magazine he was a little concerned about its circulation and its effect on General Gubbins’s.
No matter what differences arose between us, they were promptly settled by Commander Graveson (their head of Signals), usually in our favour.
‘Gravy’ held frequent meetings with Nick, and I had to attend several of them. They were arduous affairs: Gravy found it hard to believe that when Nick closed his eyes it wasn’t because he’d dozed off out of boredom, or had given up in despair at the Americans’ stupidity, but because he was communing with his private WT stations.
It was at Gravy’s instigation that I was invited to give a lecture at his sacrosanct Grosvenor Square headquarters for the benefit (he hoped) of the main-line coders who knew ‘damn-all’ about agents’ traffic. It would also be attended by some OSS staff officers, who knew even less.
I was admitted the following day to a building so innocuous that only the enemy would suspect what it contained and escorted to a large lecture room, where fifty or so of our unfortunate saviours awaited whatever was about to be inflicted on them in the name of Anglo-American relations. Gravy explained my credentials, which didn’t take long, and seated himself in the front row next to an officer whom I subsequently identified as William Casey.*
Nick, who’d recently lectured the OSS on signals and had been strangely subdued for the rest of the week, had warned me that they were a ‘hard lot to talk to’, and I decided to be strictly factual and make no attempt to sell myself, an altogether new departure.
I wrote out two messages of equal length on the blackboard and invited them to help me break them.
Their responses to the parlour game were so immediate and their guesses (even when wrong) so imaginative, that half an hour later I wanted to headhunt the lot of them, Gravy included. They were the sharpest bunch I’d yet encountered and had no difficulty in reconstructing the key phrase ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’. They gazed respectfully at the silk panaceas (including the Jedburgh code book) which I brandished aloft, but I sensed that the code war’s artefacts didn’t interest them as much as its humanities, and I described the FANYs’ round-the-clock dedication to breaking indecipherables. There was a gasp or two when I announced that their success rate was over 90 per cent. Our briefing techniques and selection procedure were also box-office.
They kept their real perceptiveness for question time. They were particularly interested to know what instructions I gave the girls when they aroused agents late at night to help them practise their c
oding. I replied that they weren’t expected to give them the wrong kind of arousal, though I suspected that there would be no finer mnemonic than pussy.
A giant sergeant with a striking resemblance to Joe Louis then raised his hand and asked who was the most difficult agent I’d ever briefed personally, and to my surprise his question met with widespread approval.
‘If you really want the answer, it’s the hell of a long one.’
They insisted that they did.
I told them that his code name was Lemur (his real name was Raoul Latimer) and that besides being highly intelligent and exceptionally resourceful he had the added distinction of being one of the few agents in the SOE who was both an organiser and a WT operator, which required attributes rarely found in the same individual.
He’d been taught to use a poem-code (the only system in use at the time) and dropped into Belgium in November ’42 to report on the progress of the Belgian secret army, which he was helping its zone commanders to form.
He was recalled to London in late ’43 after transmitting a series of flawlessly encoded messages and was scheduled to return to Belgium a month ago with the code name Pandarus. His new mission was to teach untrained partisans to use codes and WT sets, start a radio network with London and communicate with each other on D-Day. It would be a difficult enough task for an entire training school, let alone for an agent in the field.
Our problems with him began when he returned to his training school for a refresher course. His despairing instructor couldn’t understand why anyone of his intelligence was unable to use a one-time pad without making mistakes which ‘even the biggest idiots managed to avoid’. (I broke off to explain that even Commander Graveson had mastered a LOP in under ten minutes. I also explained that Pandarus had made an equally spectacular balls-up when he tried to use a WOK.)
I’d spent a whole morning with him making him practise both systems, but for every mistake I pointed out he made two new ones. It was a magnificent performance of sustained imbecility.* I finally gave up explaining the advances of WOKs and LOPs and asked why he was determined not to use them.
‘They’re too fucking dangerous to carry. Besides, they’re too difficult … I’ve come this far with the poem-code, and I’m bloody well going to stick with it.’ He then recited three new poems, all of them in French (he was bilingual), which he already knew by heart and intended to use for his future traffic.
I reminded him that his mission was to teach codes to the partisans and asked if he proposed to memorise all their poems.
‘If I have to.’
He finally conceded that he might take a batch of microfilmed poems with him but under no circumstances would he carry silk codes, even if they were camouflaged. The Germans weren’t the cunts London seemed to think they were, and he had enough trouble hiding his radio sets without walking about with half a ton of silk stuck up his arse.
I assured him that I didn’t want to damage his Low Countries, and undertook to provide him with microfilmed poems on waterproof paper and leave it at that.
The suspicious bastard then wanted to know why I’d changed my mind so quickly.
Praying that my timing was right, because nothing else was, I admitted to him that although I’d reserved a batch of WOKs and LOPs for his partisans, I was relieved that they wouldn’t be needed because they were in very short supply, and the Belgian section’s priority wasn’t as high as some other country sections …
‘If you gentlemen were in your offices that morning and heard an explosion from the direction of Baker Street, it was Pandarus fighting for the rights of the Belgian partisans.’
As soon as he’d quietened down to a frenzy, he announced that I wasn’t the only one who could change his mind and that on thinking things over he’d decided that silk codes did keep messages shorter and were more secure, and he intended to take some with him just as an experiment.
I reminded him that he’d found them difficult to use.
‘Who, me?’
He then encoded two WOK/LOP messages in close to record time without a single mistake, and half an hour later we finalised his security checks.
On 3 March he parachuted into Belgium to start a Signals course for the secret army. He took camouflaged silk codes with him as well as microfilmed poems, WT sets, signal plans and crystals.
‘And that, gentlemen, is the most difficult individual I’ve ever had to brief with the exception of a certain naval commander whose name I needn’t mention.’ I was convinced that they’d heard enough about Pandarus but I’d forgotten whom I was dealing with.
Three of them (including Bill Casey) wanted to know what he’d achieved in the field, and I was delighted to tell them that he’d taught over a hundred freedom fighters to use WOKs and LOPs and given them their security checks. He’d also taught them to use microfilmed poems in case of emergencies. Their first LOP messages had already reached London and were perfectly encoded. The one-man Signals directorate had also recruited some WT operators and was training them in a flat in Brussels. Satisfied with their progress, he’d begun issuing them with WT sets (which he’d hidden in a safe house in Verlaine until they were needed, though I didn’t say so for security reasons). He’d also given them signal plans, crystals and codes.
There was a chorus of approval. Although I’d exceeded my scheduled time by twenty minutes (which they probably expected from an Englishman), they hadn’t finished with me yet and asked a score of other questions about SOE generally. The final one came from a bemedalled major, who I ultimately discovered was head of a psychiatric unit. He wanted to know what the agents were most frightened of.
I replied that above all else they were scared of a lady dentist who had to make sure that none of their fillings were of English origin. She had also to change the impressions of their teeth before they left for the field in case the Germans had records of them. And she used continentalstyle Platarcke to hollow out their teeth and make cavities for L-tablets.* We had learned never to brief agents within a week either side of their appointments with her. There were a number of open mouths as I described how she did it, but I wasn’t asked for her address.
*
I left Grosvenor Square with only one disappointment.
I’d counted on somebody spotting a serious flaw in what I’d said and questioning me about it, but no one had.
It concerned Pandarus. I’d carefully planted that he had to give secur-ity checks to other agents. But how safely could they use these checks if Pandarus was aware of them and might himself be caught? Was this SOE’s idea of good security?
The day after my visit I was sent for by Nick. He held out a piece of paper in silence (never a good sign) and waited impatiently while I read it.
It was a memo from Hardy Amies (head of the Belgian section) to a senior member of the government-in-exile, whose confidence in SOE was waning:
EHA/1274 M.O.1. (S.P.)
Major Hardy Amies 21st April 1944
Colonel J. Marissal,
40 Eaton Square,
S.W.1.
My dear Colonel,
PANDARUS
I thought you would be interested in the following information volunteered by our coding and signal department.
‘PANDARUS has done extremely well from the signals point of view. Before he left he was briefed by signals to give MANELAUS an identity check. This was in such a form that PANDARUS himself, if caught later by the enemy, would be unable to remember it. The position now is that MANELAUS is using the check.
‘This is the first time in SOE history that an agent recruited in the field has been given an identity check without anything passing in writing!’
The same system of identity check will, in due course, be used by the zone commanders when they use their own codes.
Yours sincerely,
Nick reminded me as head of Signals that he was my zone commander, and asked if I’d kindly tell him the secret of Pandarus’s ability to forget the security checks which he had to pa
ss on.
Astonished by its simplicity, he stared at the ceiling and muttered, ‘Jesus.’ (Pandarus, who’d blasphemed so frequently I was convinced he was devout, said he’d try the system out. He was the first agent to use it but unless I could find a way to vary it, was likely to be the last.)*
I hurried back to my office and wrote a UFA (unsuitable for agents) for the girls to reconstruct: She liked smiling
At strangers
And the last one
Who smiled back at her
Took her to some woods
And she was still smiling
When they found her.
She liked black horses
And would have fondled them
If she could
When they drove her to her rest
Aged eight.
Will one of your staff
Please explain to her
Why you were out of your office
That day.
She calls you Mister Goddy
And will smile at you too
If given the chance.
I realised that April was almost over but I might still have time to contribute something useful.
If given the chance.
Notes
* Head of the CIA during Nixon’s regime but a major asset when we knew him.
* Like many of our best agents, he had the makings of an actor, though most of our actors, with the exception of Anthony Quayle, were poor agents.
* Her name was Beryl Murray-Davies, and Buckmaster made sure that his agents were taken to her Wimpole Street consulting rooms by car to ensure their arrival.
* I have been advised that for security reasons I must forget how it worked! Has nothing changed in fifty years except Britain’s prestige?
SIXTY-EIGHT
Inexcusable