Between Silk and Cyanide (25 page)

The fifteen-minute wait slouched into thirty and the thirty into forty-five. I was well into contingency time and began to worry about the Golf briefing, an appointment I was so reluctant to keep that I was determined to be early for it.

Wilson finally emerged from the briefing room accompanied by two men. I recognized one of them as Colonel Bjarne Oen, chief Intelligence officer on the Norwegian General Staff, a key member of Wilson's brains-trust. The other was a bushy-haired civilian who was talking in undertones which he appeared to have difficulty in hearing himself, and if he wasn't the professor I was Ozanne.

Wilson apologized for the delay and said that the Gunnersides were now ready for me.

I tried to look as if I were ready for them, and hurried towards the room where four months ago I had briefed the Grouse.

The six Gunnersides were Joachim Ronneberg, the team leader, Birger Stremsheim, Fredrik Kayser, Knut Haukelid, Hans Storhaus and Jasper Idland. They sprang to attention with the same immediacy as the Grouse, projected the same aura of indivisibility, and might just as well have been called Haugland, Helberg, Kjelstrup and Poulson.

I wanted to present them with a working model of a briefing officer but felt too pedestrian to conduct any traffic—a private joke which caused me to laugh out loud. I realized that the tension of my next briefing was building up on the Gunnersides' time.

They responded to their coding exercises as readily as the Grouse had, and I focused on Knut Haukelid's bowed head, unable to believe that I was in the same room with him.

He'd been an active member of the Norwegian Resistance since 10, and was one of the audacious trio which had blown up the submarine base at Trondheim. This same trio had helped to create a shuttle service of fishing smacks known as the 'Shetland bus' which ferried agents between Scotland and Norway. After the Trondheim raid Haukelid had escaped to the safe harbour of the British legation in Stockholm, and SOE's harbour-master, Major Munthe, had helped him to reach London. But the other members of the trio—Sverre Midskau and Max Manus—had been captured. Midskau was feared dead, but Max Manus threw himself off a train which was taking him to concentration camp, found his way to Stockholm, and with Munthe's help would be arriving in London in a few weeks.

That man Munthe was an invisible presence at every Norwegian briefing, and at every operation. Nor were his activities confined to Scandanavia. He'd transformed the Stockholm legation into a centerpoint for SOE's finances and communications, and its apparantly limitless resources were at the disposal of agents in Eastern Europe, the Low Countries and France. He'd also started a training camp in Sweden so that would-be Resistance fighters who'd been smuggled across the frontier could return to their own countries to act as wireless operators and saboteurs.

The Swedish authorities were aware of his extra-curricular activities (he was assistant military attache) and showed their country's strict neutrality by allowing anyone in Sweden with the inclination to do so to sing the German National Anthem in public. Occasionally Munthe was one of them.

I'd met him when he'd called at Dansey's office to discuss mainline and agents' codes. He was younger than his traffic suggested, in his middle to late twenties, a Scots fusilier whose appearance in a well-cut kilt caused the main-line coders to flash messages at him he couldn't fail to decipher. After the meeting I asked him if he were related to Axel Munthe, author of The Story of San Michele. Our Malcolm was his son. I'd offered to smuggle him across the frontier of 84, where a first edition of his father's masterpiece had pride of place in my father's legation. One day, perhaps.

The Gunnersides were proving to be slow, methodical and unadventurous coders, with Haukelid in the lead by half a message. At this rate of progress there was a real danger that I would be late for the Golf team's briefing, but I wasn't prepared to hurry the Gunnersides. Time was all I could give them.

A limpet on the hull of Haukelid's message seemed to have come unstuck and he was checking it carefully. That was the sign of a good coder. The others were labouring on.

So was I. My confidence was seeping away like sixpences in a fairground, and I knew the reason that made it even worse. I'd caught myself committing the briefing officer's worst crime: I'd thought about my next briefing in the middle of my present one, and still couldn't stop it.

Nor could I stop worrying about Plan Giskes. The operation would be so much safer if I could have access to Y's records, followed by a technical session with Nicholls and Heff.

The Gunnersides were ready, and I heard myself telling them to check each other's messages. Returning to the present, I then checked their checking, and suddenly was on my feet talking security.

I would have kept them there all day if I could. Anything to postpone the next briefing.

I realized that they were looking at me with the courteous resignation which was the Norwegian equivalent of a fidget. They had let me off lightly. Any officer who briefs entirely by reflex should be blown up at the Norsk Hydro.

My job here was done. Shoddily. Perfunctorily. But done.

I left Chiltern Court for my final briefing of the day, no longer sure if I were right about anything except the cost of being wrong.

Unless I'd misread the situation in Holland, I was on my way to meet four Dutch agents who were already blown.

Over the past two months eleven messages about their impending drop had been exchanged between London and Trumpet and Boni, who were at the very top of my list of suspect operators. Trumpet's circuit was now organizing their landing grounds and reception committees.

The elusive Jambroes was said to be eagerly awaiting them, but the elusive Giskes was just as likely to be.

Nick had strong views (which I'd canvassed) on the best way to handle the Golf team: it must be a normal briefing in every way and on no account must the agents suspect that we had any special anxieties about them. Nor must I give them code-conventions or security checks which weren't already in use in Holland because if the agents were caught and forced to disclose them, the Germans might be alerted to our suspicions about Dutch agents generally.

He agreed that each member of the Golf team could safely be given a set of questions with prearranged answers and he would ask the Dutch section to prepare them at once so that the agents had time to learn them by heart. He would make clear that the same request was being made to all country sections in case the Dutch felt singled out. I suggested he made sure that the Golf team were not told each other's questions.

I'd had such a rare feeling of security when he'd referred to '
our
anxieties…
our
suspicions' that I'd nearly disclosed Plan Giskes to him but the Executive Council had summoned him just in time and it was still a secret between me and 84.

The briefing was to be held in Bickenhall Mansions, which was a few regrets away from Chiltern Court. Major Blizzard and Captains Bingham and Killick, the three people I most wanted to avoid, emerged from the briefing room just as I arrived. They were escorting, or were being escorted by, Colonel Elder Wills, who topped the bill at any briefing. He was commanding officer of the Thatched Barn at Barnet, where he and his gifted technicians, some of them ex-convicts, forged huge quantities of currency, travel passes and work permits so that agents like the Golf team could survive in occupied Europe until they perished by the poem-code. He and I knew each other by eye-flicks but had never spoken—an achievement we saw no reason to diminish. After a whispered conversation in which I heard him the magic word 'Guilders', he left.

Captain Killick was the first to notice me, and signalled the glad tidings to his colleagues. This was the first time that I'd faced them group, and togetherness was what they projected. Nothing could persuade them that their traffic was blown, and if I'd told them that of their agents had ever made a mistake in his coding, they'd sent a message to the field asking why not.

Blizzard thanked me for coming at such short notice, and Bingham d if I'd like some coffee—a substantial improvement on the impenetrable obstinacy with which he'd responded to my countless phone calls about Ebenezer's security checks.

Declining the coffee as I'd sampled it before, I enquired how long could allow me with the four Golfers. Blizzard and Killick exchanged puzzled glances, and Bingham finally explained that there weren't four Golfers, as I'd put it. Golf was the code-name for Broadbean's W.T. operator, and the other two agents I was going to brief were Hockey and Tennis. They had common objectives but would operate independantly.

I apologised for my mistake and continued to think of them as the Golf team. But it was Bingham who'd misled me in the first place, and not for the first time.

Without pausing for breath (for which I couldn't blame him as it was highly unpleasant) he rattled off the code-names, field-names and real names of the four agents, and said that they were waiting for me in the briefing room.

This was the moment I'd been dreading. I'd prepared a special performance for the Golf team and wasn't sure that I could carry it off. I was even less sure that I had the right to try.

Blizzard asked if I would like Bingham or Killick to attend the briefing.

If I accepted his offer I couldn't proceed with my act, and nearly said, 'Yes please'. But instead I said that providing the four of them spoke English I thought I'd be better off alone with them and he agreed.

I hurried to the briefing room before either of us changed our minds, but paused outside the door to review what I was letting myself in for…

The target of today's proceedings was not the four agents. It was Giskes himself.

Until now we'd given our longstanding pen-friend no cause whatever to credit anyone in the Signals directorate with the competence to set a trap for him. We were still using the poem-code, still relying on its security checks, still sending him top secret information. It was essential to Plan Giskes that he continued to believe that he was dealing with incompetents, and one way of giving him the necessary reassurance was through the four agents waiting to be briefed.

I could do nothing to prevent their capture. But if they were interrogated by Giskes about their final code-briefing, my conduct in the next hour could do a great deal to allay whatever suspicions he might have when Plan Giskes was launched.

In basic terms, the ideal impression they would convey to him was that I seemed inexperienced, uninspired, and whatever the Dutch was for a bit of a cunt.

The high master of St Paul's had frequently expressed this in Latin in my end-of-term reports, and I was about to demonstrate just how right he had been.

I strode in, said, 'Good morning, gentlemen, or should it be good afternoon, nice weather for coding,' or some such inanity, then strolled to the briefing officer's desk, brushed some dust off the chair, some more off the desk, announced that I was allergic to dust and sneezed three times to confirm it. The mopping-up operations took a few moments to complete, then I straddled a chair and faced them.

Their names were Captain Jan Kist (Hockey), Lieutenant Gerard van Os (Broadbean), Lieutenant Willem van der Wilden (Golf) and Lieutenant Peter Wouters (Tennis). But for the next hour, which I woild try to ensure that they didn't forget, their activities in the field had no relevance. They had their missions; I had mine. All four seemed very relaxed and had obviously enjoyed their session with Wills. They had no idea what was in store for them.

Breaking them in gently, I made great play of unlocking my briefcase and searching inside it for something of utmost importance. They Seemed slightly surprised when all I produced was a copy of
The Times,
which I spread on the desk with great decorum. It was a valuable prop which I intended shortly to use.

I began the coding cabaret by enquiring if they had enough squared paper, though there were reams of it in evidence; whether their pencils were properly sharpened, which they clearly were; and whether the light was good enough, which it obviously was. I then asked them to encode a message 250 letters long—no, let's make it 300, why not—waited until they'd started and then told them
not
to use squared paper as they might not have any in the field, might they? They glanced at each other as they ruled their own.

I was already familiar with their coding as I'd sent to the training school for their practice messages. These showed that all four were above-average coders, and that William van der Wilden usually started his key-phrases with a word from the beginning of his poem and Peter Wouters with a word from the end. Kisk and van Os had developed any pattern I could spot. One in twelve of their messages had been an indecipherable and I uttered a silent briefing-room prayer that they would continue to send indecipherables when they reached the field.

They glanced at me with a hint of amusement as I grimaced my way through
The Times
crossword, and were only slightly distracted when I started doing it aloud. I asked for their help with one across, 'just to get me started', but none was forthcoming. I then enquired if they were any good at anagrams as I was hopeless at them myself. Van Os muttered something which sounded like 'Anna who?' and started transposition again. I apologized for interrupting them, 'But you'll have to get used to it in the field, you know,' and resumed mu struggle with one across. I wasn't quite as stuck as I hoped to appear because I'd set the puzzle myself, a paying hobby I'd indulged in at St Paul's as a substitute for homework.

With my incompetence at anagrams hopefully established for Giskes's benefit (a cryptographer who can't anagram is a motorist who can't steer), I rose from the desk and broke a fundamental rule of briefing by peering over their shoulders, making clucking noises of approval and encouragement, while they were still involved in the coding process.