Between Silk and Cyanide (28 page)

What possible harm could there be in showing him the file? What use could C make of it?

But I knew that I wouldn't, and heard myself telling him that the best person to address his questions to was Nick.

He looked at me with such understanding that I knocked the thine I most believed in on to the floor.

He picked up the WOK and smiled. 'Excellent,' he said.

I was barely able to listen as he delivered his formal verdict on WOKs, which he referred to by their proper title. Worked-out Keys. As far as I could gather I'd made an important contribution to agents' coding…
But none at all to Kergolay, Plan Giskes, or any of the other matters I should have discussed with him.

He listed the WOK's assets, which far outweighed my own. It had the great merit of being a one-time code which agents could destroy message by message and could not possibly remember. It saved them the wearisome business of numbering transposition-keys, and would virtually end indecipherables as the indicators were proof against Morse mutilation. The number of letters passed in a WOK could safely be reduced to 100 and its security checks were high grade. However, he had two reservations, though they were not about the system itself. He had my full attention now.

He doubted whether shuffling counters by hand would produce transposition-keys which were truly random as the girls would inevitably grow bored or careless. It would be far safer if Bletchley produced the keys by machine and he would ask Commander Dudley-Smith, one of his principal assistants, to contact me to discuss the quantity of keys required.

His more important reservation concerned the destruction of the keys as soon as they'd been used. How would an agent do this in field conditions? He regretted that he had no suggestions to offer. I told him that I'd ask our Research Station to produce a specially sensitized silk which would make the keys easy to cut away and burn. I caught him looking at me with a specially sensitized face—a one-time expression which he quickly put away before his traffic could be read. But I had no difficulty in interpreting the tummy-rumbles (his) which suddenly filled the office, and realized that it was well past lunchtime.

He did as much justice to Mother's provisions as any three coders, and chatted about a visit he'd once made to 84. But over his last cream bun he said that there was something he'd been meaning to ask me.

I hadn't relaxed over lunch and was ready for anything—absolutely thing. Except for his question.

Ee wanted to know how I'd managed to avoid being sent to Bletchley.

I told him that I'd had no need to avoid it because the question had never arisen. Bedford had done everything possible to help me but I was a hopeless pupil and was glad to accept the first job offered. He said that if ever I wrote a paper about unteachable pupils he'd like to read it. And perhaps I'd be interested in visiting Bletchley? He had no need to ask twice, and told me to arrange it with his secretary. And when I did come, perhaps I'd bring the last lines of the charts with me?

He glanced at his watch, and said he must go. He held out his hand and repeated his invitation to visit Bletchley, though he couldn't provide me with this kind of lunch.

I wanted to thank him for the banquet which he'd given me, but a question popped out before I could even begin. 'Colonel Tiltman, is there any reason why agents shouldn't use one-time pads?'

anel Tiltman sir didn't so much change colour as rank and I had a glimpse of Lieutenant Tiltman as he must have looked to Lieutenant Nick. 'One-time pads, did you say? For agents?'

guickly resumed his rank, which was peerless. 'You can discuss it with Commander Dudley-Smith when he comes here. Please thank your secretary for the tea.' He hurried away as rapidly as Nick had.

What was wrong with giving agents one-time pads?

Depression set in the moment he left, and I was alone again with my own flashy talent.

Although he'd praised WOKs, I'd lacked the courage to disobey and discuss the Dutch traffic with him. He'd know better than 8if Plan Giskes would work.

I felt like a rat who'd produced an anti-toxin. It was the kind of loneliness that made school days seem companionable.

There was only one thing I could do about it, though I never thought I'd need to. I asked to be put through to the Signals Office with top priority, and told the menaces that it was time to come home.

A stickler for established procedure, especially when it was he who'd established it, Sir Charles Hambro never communicated with the lower orders except through the heads of their directorates. But the morning after Tiltman's visit he sent a personal message 'from CD to the coders of Grendon' congratulating them on breaking over 900 indecipherables, urging them to maintain their great efforts, and assuring them that a new code called Works (sic) would make their task much easier. He also undertook to visit the station shortly to congratulate them in person.

The testimonial remained on the Grendon notice board until an anonymous FANY spelled out in capital letters the four-letter word which she believed the C of CD stood for.

It was typical of Tiltman to have put in a word for the low levels when dealing with the highest, and although Nick wouldn't disclose what else he'd told CD after he'd left me, its repercussions were immediate. I was transformed overnight from WOK-pedlar into licensed code-maker, with authority to recruit six WOK-makers, six WOK-briefers, and the staff of the Thatched Barn to do the camouflage. I also had authority to launch Plan Giskes.

My licence to be a trap-setter hadn't come from SOE but from an authority with wider terms of reference: my own free mind. Now that Tiltman was SOE's adviser, I need no longer worry about the future of agents' codes if Plan Giskes cost me my job.

But I was beginning to run out of excuses for visiting the Signals Office in case the Dutch section cancelled a message to the field and I wasn't on hand to make improper use of it.

To briefing offices, every agent was a problem. But Francis Cammaerts was a problem agent. Officially I knew nothing about him. Nothing, that is, except for the few mandatory details every country section supplied with a 'body for briefing'.

He was a Buckmaster agent, would be known in the field as Roger, and was due to go into France in the March moon. Further information would be irrelevant to the teaching of double-transposition. If it hadn't been for the grapevine operated by the Brotherhood of Briefing Officers I would never have known about Francis Cammaert's extraordinary past which set him apart from any agent in our combined experience.

None of us quite understood what he was doing in SOE. He was an ardent pacifist who refused to join the armed forces as all human life was sacrosanct, and it was wrong to take it under any circumstances. He registered as a conscientious objector and was summoned appear before the tribunal set up to judge the sincerity of 'conchies'. After cross-examining him about his principles, the tribunal ordered him to take up agricultural work for the duration of the war. After a year as a farm labourer he volunteered to be dropped behind enemy lines. Some thought it was the death of his brother in the RAF which convulsed his thinking, others that he was sickened by what he'd read Nazi atrocities. Whatever the truth of it, he'd convinced Selwyn Jepson, SOE's chief head-hunter, and Maurice Buckmaster, a tribunal of one, that he was an excellent prospect as both saboteur and organizer, and they'd recruited him into SOE.

The Brotherhood of Briefing Officers (BOBO for short) unanimously disagreed with his acceptance. Although they reluctantly conceded that he was highly intelligent, in the opinion of the BOBO he had no flair for sabotage or leadership, and was in conflict about reversing his attitudes. The kindest comments about him came (as they so often did) from his coding instructor at Beaulieu, who said in his report that he was 'a plodder who does his best to follow instructions but seems unable to grasp the basic principles'. A school-master by profession, and apparently a gifted one, he'd proved a problem pupil on every course he'd so far attended.

Relctant to leave my desk in case N section cancelled a message to the field, I resolved to spend as little time briefing Cammaerts as I conscientiously could. There would be ample time between now and March to re-brief him if I made the plodding progress I anticipated.

I was quite unprepared for his physical impact. Buckmaster had cornered the market in giant agents, and this one dwarfed even Rabinovitch, whose Orchard Court chair he was straddling with equal discomfort.

There was nothing plodding about his eyes as they assessed the merits of his briefing officer. Nothing plodding about the way he wrote out the text of the message he was about to encode. It was when he started to encode it that he began living up to his reputation. He paused after every five letters as if counting heads in a classroom. Eventually satisfied that all were present and correct, he appeared to form the letters into a crocodile, which he led in slow procession across the courtyard of his paper. There was another pause while he took a roll-call. And yet another while he seemed to rebuke some letters he'd caught pulling faces at each other. And that was only the first transposition.

By the time he'd reached the second I could have strolled to the nearest church, said a prayer for Tiltman's preservation, and waited for an official acknowledgement. Instead I glanced at his code-card.

His poem was in French, and I remembered that his uncle was a famous Belgian poet. If he'd chosen one of his, I hoped he'd do justice to it.

The BOBO's explanation that Cammaerts was a plodder wouldn't help me to unplod him. Yet the longer I watched him at work, the more I began to suspect that he wasn't plodding at all. I asked him to stop encoding for a moment. I was going to take a gamble with Cammaerts which might bring him to a permanent standstill.

I showed him the mathematics of double-transposition.

If I'd been teaching him to drive (which God forbid, for both our sakes) I'd have assessed him as someone who needed to understand the mechanics of his car because he suspected that it wasn't roadworthy, and that he'd have to be his own breakdown service on this particular journey.

Feeling like a spiritual AA, I did my best not to talk down to him. Sensing that maths wasn't his subject (it turned out to be history), I explained as simply as I could what happened to the letters as they were shuffled through their 'cages', and showed him the relationship between the code-groups when the transposition was complete. His questions showed that he'd understood every word of it, and I didn't lose him at all until I forgot that I wasn't trying to turn him into a cryptographer.

As if to confirm that he'd seen enough, the man with a need to know resumed his encoding. He didn't spurt or do anything spectacular but cruised towards the traffic lights, waited till they changed, and proceeded quietly and steadily to pass his driving test.

There was a lesson in all this. The more intelligent the agent, the less likely he was to respond if he were taught the mechanics of coding mechanically.

I'd been slow to realize that what Cammaerts had really been doing was coding with character, testing the logic of it all, trying to satisfy himiself that these alien procedures were soundly based, taking nothig and no one for granted, least of all his various instructors.

It was going to need a special calibre of WOK-briefer to deal with agents like this one. I couldn't recruit FANYs for their looks alone. I decided to be selfish and show him a WOK myself. There would be plenty of time between now and March to make sure that he understood the thinking behind it.

l realized that he was asking me a question. He wanted to know (paths were my subject, and I told him that I didn't have one.

He looked hard at me and smiled.

It may have been the quality of that smile or the penetration of that look, but I found myself feeling very sorry for anyone who made the mistake of writing this man off.

Unless he happened to be German.

On 15 February I had a better excuse than usual for visiting the Signals Office. The night squad had broken an indecipherable from Rabinovitch after 1,500 attempts, and I wanted to teleprint my congratulations.

Bingham of the Dutch section slithered towards me and asked if he could have a quick word, though we rarely had any other kind. He was a verbal weight-watcher. He said that he wanted to cancel a message to Holland but didn't know the new procedure. Who should he talk to?

It took me a moment to realize what he'd said. He wanted to cancel a message to Holland. It was the first time I'd been tempted to kiss a fox.

I told him that he was talking to the right person, and that I'd be delighted to cancel it for him. He said that it was message number 60 to Boni, and thanked me for my help as he had a meeting in five minutes. Lowering his lisp, he added that if it was too late to cancel the message, it wouldn't really matter as he was sending a message to Boni tomorrow changing his instructions. He thanked me again and hurried off to keep his appointment.

I hurried into the supervisor to keep mine with Giskes.

Number 60 to Boni was on top of a pile of messages waiting to be teleprinted to Grendon. I told the supervisor that there was a query on it which the country section wanted to discuss with me, and that if she'd give me her copy I'd return it as soon as I could. She handed it over at once.

An empty office. A cancelled message. A panic attack.

The entire concept could be wrong.

I picked up the receiver to speak to Tiltman. It put itself back. I wished I knew what moral courage was, but it was too late to ask Cammaerts to define it, though those who have it seldom can. I remembered his smile, picked up my pen, and with an unsteady hand prepared the cancelled message for transmission to the field.

Plan Giskes had begun.