Between Silk and Cyanide

by Leo Marks

  Pimentos were Mother’s favourite vegetable.

  On 11 June her favourite only child began preparing his address to the Milton Hall mutineers so that it would sound spontaneous in three days’ time, but I was unable to get beyond my opening sentence (‘Listen, you bastards, if you can remember how to’) as I couldn’t stop brooding about the Polish government-in-exile.

  An important Polish operation, code-named Bardsea, which was supposed to have taken place on D-Day, had been abandoned because of political in-fighting amongst the Polish authorities, an art at which they had no equal.

  SOE’s relationship with the Polish government-in-exile was as hard to understand as a mental one-time pad. Its complexity not only caused problems for everyone but the enemy, it made reality fight for its life.

  SOE’s Polish directorate (known as MP) was run by Colonel Perkins and was responsible for recruiting Polish expatriates, turning them into agents and dropping them into France and Poland to work for SOE. But the Polish government-in-exile also recruited expatriates, though in far larger numbers, and despatched them to the same territories, usually on missions of which we knew nothing.

  Foreseeing most of this and realising that some semblance of co-ordination would be helpful, Gubbins had a conference in 1940 with General Sikorski (the Polish prime minister whom SOE had smuggled into England) and agreed to create a special department in the Polish directorate known as EU/P.

  As I understood it, EU/P’s function was to liaise with the Polish authorities to prepare Bardsea for D-Day, to ensure that their operations into France weren’t duplicated and to start a free exchange of information. The ministries agreed to the arrangement and honoured it whenever it suited them. The head of EU/P was Major Hazell, who’d been doing the job since 1941 but had little to show for it except premature old age and the prospect of monitoring Bardsea after spending three years discussing it. His unofficial remit was to find out as much as he could about the government-in-exile’s independent operations. But the Polish authorities found a use for Hazell which SOE hadn’t foreseen.

  By D-Day the Polish Ministry of the Interior and their Ministry of National Defence were no longer on speaking terms and insisted on using Hazell’s EU/P section as their sole means of communication, which may not have helped the war effort but guaranteed him full employment.

  Bardsea’s traffic did as much for me. The Polish agents were to use LOPs and WOKs for their messages, which they’d been instructed to keep to a minimum (a near guarantee that they wouldn’t). But it wasn’t the agents’ traffic which was taking up so much brooding time. It was the government-in-exile’s.

  Despite a recent Foreign Office ruling that until further notice all governments-in-exile must pass the whole of their traffic (including diplomatic) in British, American or Russian ciphers, the Polish governmentin-exile was still allowed to use its own codes. I’d no idea what they were, and Nick warned me that under no circumstances must I attempt to find out as they were none of SOE’s business: ‘The decision’s been taken at the highest level. Don’t even think of questioning it.’

  I wasn’t able to stop. Nick may have forgotten (his memory had become an Overlord casualty) that on the eve of Tiltman the Great’s visit to Baker Street he’d told me that both Bletchley and the Germans had been reading Russian codes for years and that it was only when the Germans declared war on the Soviet Union that the Foreign Office warned the Russians to change them immediately. I found this aspect of the code war completely indecipherable, as it must have cost tens of thousands of Russian lives.

  It seemed certain that the Polish authorities in London would want to report Bardsea’s progress to their ministries abroad, which would cause unquantifiable damage if the codes weren’t high-grade.

  Had the Foreign Office vetted them? It was such an obvious precaution that it couldn’t be taken for granted. And why had the Poles been made an exception to the rule? Above all, had the Foreign Office been properly briefed about Bardsea?

  Its importance had begun filtering through to the Signals directorate.

  It was to be a joint operation: the Poles were to supply the agents; SOE was to drop them. Its purpose was to land a hundred highly trained agents near Lille, where they’d link up with the half-million Polish expatriates who lived and worked in the area. Amongst their other resistance activities, these expatriates had formed a secret army called Monica.

  SOE had been told little about Monica apart from its code name, but in February Chalmers-Wright (a former member of the Political Warfare Executive) had crossed the Pyrenees on a tour of inspection and strolled back two months later by the same route to report to Perkins and Hazell that, if Monica could be supplied with arms and explosives and given the proper targets, it could mount and maintain a major uprising and would have an enormous D-Day potential.

  Without disclosing what he knew, Hazell tried to persuade the Poles to clarify Monica’s role on D-Day while there was still time to exploit its potential, but they were reluctant to discuss Monica’s activities, and all EU/P section had so far discovered was that Bardsea agents were to be dropped to Monica’s reception committees.

  End of brood, and the start of my efforts to find out what I could about the government-in-exile’s codes.

  I manufactured an excuse to visit Hazell and casually mentioned that it would be a pity if the Germans learned about Monica through the government-in-exile’s traffic, and he equally casually mentioned to their chief signals officer that SOE had a good line in codes. The signals officer replied that he was familiar with our systems and thought they were excellent, but perhaps we’d come up with some new ones he hadn’t been shown, in which case he’d be glad if Hazell could produce a few specimens.

  I invited him to my office and gave him freedom of the walls after removing the Free French and SAS code books (I left the Jedburgh code books intact as the Poles were aware of their activities).

  It may have been Mother’s sandwiches, Muriel’s red hair or the effect of the lighting, but just when I was wondering how to introduce the subject of the code which mattered most to me he asked if we could possibly supply him with two hundred LOPs immediately as he needed them ‘for a most important purpose’.

  Although we couldn’t afford to part with them, I promised that they’d be delivered to his office within the next two hours, hoping that the government-in-exile would start using them at once.

  He then asked if I’d like to accompany him to meet the hundred Bardsea agents in training. I was due to visit them anyway, but accepted his invitation. Two days later, he turned up at the wheel of a jeep, and I soon learned how Chalmers-Wright felt crossing the Pyrenees.

  A few mountain peaks later he thanked me for the LOPs, then immediately began discussing the route, so I still don’t know what their ‘urgent purpose’ was. Our dropping zone was a holding school near Horsham, where the Bardsea agents had been incarcerated for months, waiting for D-Day.

  Reluctant to surrender the driving seat to me, the signals officer insisted on acting as interpreter.

  They understood their LOPs perfectly but had to struggle a bit with their WOKs, and I sensed from the extra weight in their eyes that the Bardseas had been taught to use other codes about which we knew nothing. Although some of them had almost certainly taken part in the national sport of confining Polish Jews to ghettos, they were a magnificent bunch, highly trained, counting the seconds to go, and excellent pupils. Mass briefings like this were usually two-way traffic pogroms, but the Bardseas has a special quality, and several hours later I felt almost ready to drop with them to Monica.

  On D-Day the entire Bardsea operation was cancelled due to another bout of in-fighting. None of us doubted the Poles’ courage, or their determination to attack the common enemy, or how much the Allies owed to General Sikorski’s leadership (he’d died in ’43).

  But what a fuck-up. What a waste of a hundred first-class agents, of Monica’s potential, of LOPs we couldn’t spare.

  Hazell
asked if they could be returned to us but the signals officer replied that the Poles ‘would find very good use for them’.

  Knowing their macabre sense of humour, I didn’t ask what it was.

  *

  On the morning of the 12th I learned that Violette Szabo had been captured by the Germans.

  She’d been dropped back into France on the 7th with Staunton to re-establish his Salesman circuit, but three days later she and one of his assistants (Anastasie) were trying to reach Limoges by car when they were spotted by an advance party of the Das Reich Division. She held up the Germans with her Sten gun for as long as she could to give Anastasie the chance to escape and complete his mission but was caught when her ammunition ran out.

  I hadn’t seen her since she’d returned by Lysander in April, as her coding instructress had told me that all Violette needed was a new WOK. She hadn’t yet used her poem and was anxious not to change it.

  Since I couldn’t justify a visit, I’d sent her a note saying that I hadn’t lost a single game of chess with the set that she’d given me, which was true as I hadn’t yet used it.

  She sent a note back promising if she had to use her poem she wouldn’t make a single spelling mistake.

  I left for Milton Hall with her chess set in my briefcase.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  ‘They also serve …’

  Built in the seventeenth century, Milton Hall was a few miles from Peterborough but managed to live it down, and everything about it was sepulchral except for its present inhabitants, who were waiting for me in the lecture room, all of them wearing British, American or French uniforms.

  I’d asked Colonel Musgrove not to introduce me and strode to the platform unannounced. Someone laughed, and someone else blew a raspberry (or worse) as I turned to face them, and I knew that if I didn’t establish a beachhead with my first sentence, there wouldn’t be a second.

  I remembered the approach I’d selected on the night of the Bardsea brood: ‘Listen, you bastards, if you can remember how to …’

  Beachhead established.

  ‘While we’re scoring points off each other, an agent in France has only one hope of not being caught, and that’s to be picked up by Lysander in the next few hours … Would it bore you to know what’s stopping us?’

  This is the most important talk I’ve ever given.

  ‘He’s lost his silks and had to use his poem to give us his pick-up points, but the silly sod’s made a mistake in his coding and the bloody thing’s indecipherable, indéchiffrable, impossible to read …’

  Is it the shock of Violette’s capture that’s made me realise what I must say?

  ‘Two hundred girls are working the clock round to break it, and I should be up there trying to help them instead of pissing around with Jedburghs who’ve forgotten how to learn …’

  Concentrate on the girls.

  ‘They’ve already made ten thousand attempts to crack it, and they’re on their second ten now, and you might like to know that when you’re in France, as you bloody soon will be, we’ll do the same for you because we happen to be cunts enough to believe that you’re worth it …’

  Shoulders back, change tone, the next bit’s critical.

  ‘You’ve been told that because you’ll be wearing uniform, you’ll be treated as prisoners of war if you’re caught. I don’t think you should bank on it …’

  Colonel Musgrove stiffened at this because I’d no right to say it. But I’d even less right not to. The first thing they’d be tortured for would be their codes and security checks.

  ‘If you’re caught, you could lie to them about your one-time pads and WOKs, provided you’ve had the sense to destroy the used portions, but poems are a different matter.’

  Stop dreading the next stage or the bastards will pick it up.

  ‘I’m going to risk turning my back on you because there’s something I want you to have a good look at, and I don’t mean my arse.’

  I took the cover off the blackboard, on which the coding instructress had written two messages of equal length, one on top of the other. ‘These are two messages in the same poem-code. I want you to see how the Boche would break them, and they’re a bloody sight better at it than I am …’

  I’d been dreading this moment because I hadn’t shown anyone what I was about to show them. Until now I’d made a parlour game of poem-cracking, which most audiences enjoyed as much as I did. But these audiences had never included agents, who’d had to make do with warnings, as I was afraid that the extra anxiety would make them send even more indecipherables.

  Christ, how wrong I was, and how late to find it out.

  More and more agents were using their poems because their silks weren’t to hand, or because it was more convenient. But we didn’t know how the Jedburghs would behave, though the signs were ominous. Their traffic would be equally new to the Germans, who would take great interest in it.

  But it would be no good warning this bunch to keep their poems for emergencies; they’d go out of their way to create them. Nor would it be enough to play the parlour game with them. I had to make brave men frightened to use their poems and risk the indecipherables they’d send us. And the only way to frighten them would be to make them watch the mathematics involved and show them the technical tricks of the trade, even though they were unlikely to understand them.

  Herr von Marks began breaking the two messages without any concessions to the Jedburghs, hoping they’d let him finish. But in the middle of playing a German cryptographer I had a lapse of concentration, and found myself thinking about ‘The life that I have’, and for the first time wished I hadn’t written it.

  But that wasn’t my only lapse. The room was so full of death I began thinking about a conversation I’d heard in the Signals Office concerning a young man who was about to be hanged for murder, and the girls had asked what I thought about capital punishment.

  I hadn’t answered them then but a poem spurted out now:

  It’s agreed

  That a good preventative

  Must be neither weak nor tentative

  And that the vicious and aberrant

  Are in need of a deterrent

  But while millions are going under

  By design or blunder

  Must we claim one more

  Just to settle the score?

  Shall we really feel safer

  When he snaps like a wafer?

  Will there never be enough breath about

  While there’s breath about?*

  Glancing at my mental watch, I found I’d overrun by six minutes. I spared them the interval counts (they’d never know how lucky they were) and five minutes later the code groups surrendered their texts.

  I turned round to see the effect. They were staring at the blackboard as if they’d just discovered holes in their bulletproof vests.

  This is the moment for the parlour game.

  I showed them how the Boche reconstructed poems from transposition keys and invited them to have a go at the key I’d just broken. They were the noisiest cryptographers I’d met, competing with each other to roar out their suggestions, some of them right.

  Keep quiet and let ’em go solo.

  They continued Jedburghising the key for another ten minutes, which was as much as it could take.

  I hoped I’d chosen an appropriate quotation: ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’ The cheer that went up could have been heard by its author after whom Milton Hall was named (it was the last line of Milton’s sonnet on his blindness).

  I’ll know in the next ten seconds if I’ve really seen the light.

  ‘Any questions?’

  A hand shot up but I couldn’t see who owned it.

  ‘Yes, hand?’

  ‘This may be a damn stupid suggestion …’

  Christ, a shy Jedburgh.

  ‘Mr Marks … can we do anything to help you break that agent’s message?’

  An even louder cheer went up, reducing the others to a whisper. />
  That’s the most important question I’ve ever been asked.

  I mumbled my thanks and undertook to let them know at once if the girls needed help with the keys. ‘Any more questions?’

  An authoritative voice called out, ‘Get back to that indecipherable. You’ve told us all we need to know.’

  I left for London without inspecting the library.

  I returned to a summons from Nick, who told me at once that he’d had a call from Colonel Musgrove; he was ‘far from displeased by the results of my visit’ but had said something which puzzled him. ‘The Jedburghs are pestering him to know if the indecipherable’s been broken, and he’s interested too. Which message are they talking about?’

  ‘It came in from Emile last week. We broke it on Friday, and he was picked up on Saturday. I pretended we were still working on it because they don’t like ancient history.’

  He seemed about to comment but changed his mind and announced that I was to keep the whole of tomorrow morning free for a ‘very important visitor’.

  Still thinking about the Jedburghs, I learned that his name was Commander Denniston and that he’d been in charge of Bletchley until two years ago.

  I woke up sharply. ‘Then he knows Tiltman?’

  ‘Knows him? – He was John’s boss.’

  ‘I never knew he had one. What’s Denniston doing now?’

  ‘That’s not your concern. He’ll be here at ten o’clock tomorrow, and you’re to answer his questions fully.’