by Leo Marks
On 30 April five Dutch agents (including Cricket and Swale) were dropped blind into Holland, each taking with him a LOP and a WOK with a poem in reserve.
On the same night Violette Szabo was picked up by Lysander and returned to England.
Also on the same night I realised how unlucky agents were to depend on me for their safety. I’d made a mistake which could have cost many of them their lives, and while the rest of SOE welcomed May as their last chance to prepare for D-Day (it was expected in June) I relived that mistake in case I could learn from it.
It concerned a Buckmaster agent code-named Bricklayer, whose real name was France Antelme, field name Renault, and who, according to Charlotte, was an ‘agent extraordinaire’. It was easier (and still is) to dwell on what made him extraordinary than on what I’d done to make him extinct.
In his early forties and exceedingly rich (he’d inherited sugar, tobacco and coconut plantations in Mauritius), he was an astute businessman with a large number of high-level financial, industrial and political contacts, especially in Paris. He’d been dropped into France in November ’42 and returned to London in March ’43. He was dropped again in May ’43 and returned in July ’43. In the course of these missions he’d persuaded bankers and industrialists to make substantial contributions to resistance activities (and to set aside vast sums of currency for the invading forces), reported the collapse of Prosper to London and been a great help to Bodington. He’d also found a safe house for Noor Inayat Khan (Madeleine). But to Buckmaster the most important part of Antelme’s activities was his efforts to persuade Edouard Herriot (the former prime minister and France’s ‘Grand Old Man’) to return to England with him. If he could achieve this, it would be a major coup for F section, especially as Herriot was in close touch with the new premier, Paul Reynaud. But Herriot had so far resisted on grounds of old age.
Determined to try again, Antelme was due to return to France in February ’44. And this was the start of the code department’s nightmare.
A hard man to dissuade once his mind was made up (and an awkward customer at the best of times), Antelme had decided that he would return to a dropping ground and reception committee organised by the highly suspect Phono circuit, of which Noor was an active member. Although Buckmaster and George Noble tried to convince him that Noor was caught and showed him the two-way traffic they’d exchanged with her in an effort to prolong her life, he refused to believe them. Nor would he accept that Phono was blown. Noble then explained that Noor had a ‘special’ security check which she must use only if she were caught and showed him how it worked. But Antelme maintained that she’d used it by accident or hadn’t understood the check in the first place.
Buckmaster tried to persuade him to ‘drop blind’ but he refused to consider it; and Maurice (anxious not to antagonise him and perhaps not quite as convinced of Noor’s capture as Noble and I were) finally agreed to instruct the Phono circuit to prepare to receive Bricklayer and two other agents during the next moon period. They must also be prepared to receive fourteen containers.
Maurice then took the precaution (as he saw it) of sending in four young agents on 8 February to prepare for Bricklayer’s arrival. They included an American WT operator named Robert Byerley, to whom I’d given an ‘extended briefing’ in the use of his one-time pad and checks. On 10 February he sent a message in his LOP confirming his safe arrival, but his security checks were wrong. Noble at once asked him a test question, to which he should have answered, ‘Merry Xmas.’ The following day he replied, ‘Happy New Year.’
Although there was no doubt that Byerley (and presumably his three companions) had been caught, Bricklayer insisted on proceeding with his plans, and on 29 February he was dropped near Chartres accompanied by his WT operator, Daks (Lionel Lee), and a young Frenchwoman (Madeleine Damerment), who was to act as his courier.
On 2 March Noor sent a message confirming that arms, radio equipment and money had been successfully dropped but that Bricklayer had severely damaged his head on landing. She amplified this a few days later by saying he’d been taken to hospital, that he was in a coma and that according to his doctors his condition was critical.
Nothing had yet been heard from Daks, and London demanded to know why he hadn’t reported the accident himself.
After another week of radio silence (an awesome sound) Daks sent a message in his one-time pad explaining that his WT set had been damaged on landing, and this accounted for the delay. He confirmed that Bricklayer had been taken to hospital and was still in a coma.
So were Daks’s security checks: the code-room supervisor had marked his message ‘security checks incorrect’ but hadn’t given the details.
Knowing that he was an erratic coder who’d frequently omitted his security checks in training or substituted those of his own making, I sent for the code groups so that I could examine them myself. Like all WOK/LOP users, he’d been taught never to transmit the indicator groups exactly as they were printed but to change them by prearranged numbers. He was to add 4 to the second letter and 3 to the third. If he changed them by any other numbers we’d know that he’d been caught. The indicator in his first message was dbopr, and he should have changed it to DFRPR to tell us he was safe. But instead he’d inverted the last two letters of DBOPR and transmitted DBORP.
I immediately informed Noble that we must assume Daks was under duress, but warned him he’d made exactly the same inversions in two of his training messages and that there was an outside chance that he was having one of his lapses. Noble hoped that he was but didn’t think it likely and undertook to ask him some personal questions immediately. He added that Bricklayer and Daks had been instructed to cut contact with the Phono circuit as soon as they’d landed, but he was convinced that they hadn’t done so.
On 8 April Daks transmitted two more messages, and the supervisor at 53a telephoned me to report that she’d decoded them herself and that he’d used his security checks correctly. Since she was the most reliable of all our supervisors, I didn’t ask her to teleprint the code groups to London so that I could double-check them. Instead I informed Noble that Daks was now using his security checks correctly, though there must still be a question mark against him.
Noble phoned me soon afterwards with an even larger one. Was I certain that Daks’s security checks were correct? He’d made no attempt to answer his personal questions.
Ten minutes later I did the double-checking I should have done in the first place. Daks had again inverted the last two letters of his indicator group, but had made no attempt to change the second and third letters by the requisite numbers. Yet the supervisor had told me that his checks were correct. I telephoned to ask her what she thought they were, unaware that the Decline and Fall of the Holy Coding Empire was only seconds away.
According to the station’s code card, Daks hadn’t been given any secret numbers. All he had to do to tell us he was safe was insert three sets of dummy letters at the beginning, middle and end of every message. He’d failed to do so in his first message but had inserted them correctly in the two we’d just received.
We’d sent the station the wrong code card. The one she believed to be Daks’s was a copy of the conventions he’d used at training school before his checks had been finalised. He’d been taught to insert three sets of dummy letters as an additional check, and this was all that he’d remembered. I asked what significance she’d attached to the inversion of his indicator groups.
She replied, ‘None at all.’ She then reminded me that I’d warned the girls that many agents found their silks difficult to read and that their indicators were often Morse-mutilated, and she’d assumed that either or both of these factors accounted for Daks’s inversions. She also thought I’d given him a ‘special check’, as I had to Noor, and that it consisted only of inserting dummy letters.
But the Daks disaster didn’t end there. I discovered that his real code card was nestling in his training file and had never been despatched. I also discovered t
hat a trusted member of the typing pool had misspelt two words of his poem.
However, the real mistakes were mine. I’d neglected to examine his code groups myself, and if Noble hadn’t questioned my assurances about his security checks, the cost to F section’s agents would have been unquantifiable.
I felt equally guilty about the typing errors and our failure to send the right code card, as I’d chosen the girls responsible and should have realised that their limitations were almost as great as mine.
I tried to confess the balls-up to Noble but Buckmaster took the call. I explained what had happened, admitted that the mistake was entirely my fault and said that there could no longer be any doubt that Daks had been caught.
There was a moment’s silence, the longest I’d known in a conversation with Buckmaster. ‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘it’s only agents’ lives which are at stake …’
On 20 April Daks regretted to inform London that Bricklayer had died in hospital without recovering consciousness.
On the 21st Noor sent a similar message and asked whether London would be sending a replacement.
If there’d been any justice, I’d have volunteered.
On 5 May we received our first message from Holland in a one-time pad. It was in Cricket’s code and had been transmitted by Swale. Cricket reported that the RVV (the clandestine organisation he’d been ordered to contact) didn’t want a liaison officer; it needed a bloody nursemaid. His security checks were correct.
On 8 May Swale reported that he was transmitting from an attic which wasn’t properly earthed and wanted to know whether his key clicks would disturb other radios. He also enquired about the dangers of DF-ing in Amsterdam, which he feared were considerable. His security checks were correct.
For the next ten days the agents kept in regular contact with London. Cricket reported that he was trying to arrange a dropping point so that the RVV could receive arms and explosives. He was also trying to put them in radio contact with London so that they could receive instructions from the Allied High Command when they’d established their bridgeheads. (He’d been authorised to give the RVV 50,000 florins when he considered it appropriate.)
Swale reported that German troop trains were moving soldiers from Holland to Paris and asked if he could be told the date of the invasion a few days in advance as half Amsterdam’s police force would go into hiding to avoid being sent to Germany.
On 19 May he reported that he was training a new WT operator to take over his skeds on alternate weeks and asked permission to show him his signal plan. He also repeated his request to be told the date of the invasion as it was very important. But, for the first time in nine messages, he’d used the wrong security checks. He should have added 2 to the second letter of his indicator group and 4 to the fourth. Instead he’d added 19 to the second letter and 20 to the fourth.
I informed Dobson (head of N section) that Swale had been caught.
On 20 May Dobson asked him for the full name of his new WT operator and regretted that he was unable to give him the date of the invasion.
On 21 May Swale supplied the name of his new operator and repeated his request to be allowed to show him his signal plan. This time he added 21 to the second letter of his indicator group and 22 to the fourth, and I wondered what his pattern was.
On 22 May Dobson authorised him to share his signal plan with the new operator and then asked him a test question: ‘What do you know?’ If he was safe, he’d reply, ‘American soldier.’
On 23 May he replied, ‘American sailor.’ He also reported that he’d been unable to deliver London’s messages to Faro as his cut-out had disappeared. This time he’d added 23 to the second letter of his indicator group, and 24 to the fourth, and I realised that he’d told the Germans he had to alter his indicator group according to the date!
On the 24th London informed him that Cricket had been instructed to cut contact with Faro as he might be in danger and advised him for his sake to do the same.
On 22 May Cricket sent a message giving London a dropping point. For the first time in fourteen messages his security checks were incorrect. He should have added 2 to the second letter of his indicator group and 3 to the third. Instead he’d added 4 to the fourth letter and 5 to the fifth. He’d also numbered his message 14 when it should have been 15.
I told Dobson that Cricket had also been caught and offered to show him the checks if he had any doubts. But he’d already suspected it.
On 24 May he informed Cricket that his dropping ground couldn’t be accepted and reminded him that for his own safety he should cut contact with Faro. The two-way bluff traffic showed no signs of abating, and I didn’t envy Dobson the onus of sustaining it.
But May’s losses weren’t confined to France and Holland. Pandarus had been in regular contact since his return to Belgium, and all his messages had been perfectly encoded with their security checks correct. Six of his pupils had also started using their one-time pads with the checks that he’d given them. We’d received no traffic from Pandarus for a fortnight.
On 30 May Hardy Amies telephoned to say that he’d learned ‘from a reliable source’ that Pandarus had been caught. Hardy, who trusted people completely on the rare occasions when he trusted them at all, said that he continued to believe that Pandarus would be unable to remember the checks he’d passed on to other agents, though I still hadn’t told him how the system worked.
But I wasn’t properly earthed myself, and the moment he rang off I began wondering if my ‘bright idea’ had flaws in it which I hadn’t foreseen. If it did, the security of countless Belgian partisans would be in jeopardy.
I also wondered what else could go wrong in the run-up to D-Day. There was no invasion quite as deadly as self-doubt.
SIXTY-NINE
For Your Ears Only
By 1 June (referred to as ‘D-Day minus five’ by the cognoscenti) Nick was still endeavouring to weld his collection of freak talents into a Morse-minded entity, and it wouldn’t be his fault if we failed our entrance exam to maturity.
As a result of the support he’d given to technicians he trusted, WT operators were no longer forced to come on the air at fixed times and on the same frequencies. They were now using variable signal plans, which enabled them to pass their traffic at irregular intervals and on different channels. Nor did they any longer have to carry camouflaged WT sets weighing almost 40 pounds from safe house to safe house – often the last journeys they made. Instead they were given portable wireless sets, each equipped with a power pack, which made the operators independent of mains and ensured that their consumption of electricity could no longer be detected. Other lifesavers sponsored by him included S-phones and Eurekas, which enabled agents to talk to aircraft, and squirt-transmitters, which could send a hundred letters in a matter of seconds.
But he shared my anxiety about the number of agents who’d been told in poem-codes which BBC messages they must listen out for and what they signified. He’d warned the country sections that the meaning of the prearranged phrases could only safely be transmitted to agents who were using WOKs or LOPs, but on the night of 1 June the BBC broadcast over three hundred ‘stand by’ messages alerting the Resistance that D-Day was imminent. The significance of at least thirty of them had been conveyed in poem-codes.
On 3 June Nick instructed me to report to him in advance of yet another meeting with Gravy, as he had something to tell me which the OSS mustn’t hear.
He disclosed that although Eisenhower continued to have confidence in SOE, the Chiefs of Staff were worried about our role on D-Day and feared that our Dutch debacle would be repeated in France. They didn’t trust our communications either, as they believed that our technical improvements had come too late and that some of our traffic would blow the date of Overlord. They’d also concluded (with a little help from C) that the French Resistance ‘had been penetrated to such a significant extent’ that the most the partisans could contribute to D-Day was ‘a nuisance value’. Because of these and numerous o
ther reservations (especially about de Gaulle) they’d decided that the secret armies ‘and SOE’s other odds and sods’ mustn’t be alerted to the imminence of Overlord till the last possible moment.
Nick was about to amplify these misgivings when he was informed by his secretary that Commander Graveson had arrived, and he reluctantly told her to show him in at once.
This reluctance was a new factor because by now Gravy had become ‘one of us’, but we could no longer talk freely in front of him as the OSS had begun a joint operation with C. We knew that its code name was Sussex and that it was an intelligence-gathering operation taking place in France, but that was the extent of our knowledge, and we hoped that the Germans were equally ill-informed.
Gravy had called in to report on his recent inspection of Milton Hall, the Jedburgh training school, which was staffed by British and American instructors (by mutual consent, for once genuine, it was under the overall command of the British). He dealt first with the Americans’ reaction to the Jedburgh code book.
Careful to stress his admiration for the way in which it reduced the effects of Morse mutilation, he said that many Americans had complained that looking up the phrases they needed and then copying the code groups on to one-time pads was ‘one hell of a performance’, and they wanted to encode their messages straight on to one-time pads without using the code books. Did we agree?
I replied that it would be perfectly safe for them to do this, but if they had long messages to transmit the code book would greatly reduce their length and allow them to get off the air quickly, a major consideration at all times, especially on D-Day. We agreed that they should be given the option.
He then said that ‘all Jedburghs, not just the Americans’ found double-transposition ‘heavy going’ and that most of them questioned if they’d ever need to use it.
I pointed out that if they didn’t know how to, they’d be unable to use WOKs, which would enable them to pass another two hundred messages safely. Nor could they use poems, which would be their last chance of communicating if they lost their silks. Heavy going or not, there could be no compromise on this.