Between Silk and Cyanide (3 page)

That first indecipherable of Skinnarland's had been a warming-up present from him to me and had proved no more troublesome than an undone shoelace. Wilson expected the new one to be cracked as easily. But Skinnarland had had the better of our two-day duel, and five minutes before his operator's schedule I just had to get away from the thousands of failed attempts which littered my desk. I strolled upstairs to the teleprinter room to listen to the healthy chatter of Dansey's main-line codes. Suddenly I knew what Skinnarland had done and saw that, if I took a short cut and drew together several columns of his message, I would get the word 'sentries' in one line with the word 'Vermok' immediately beneath it. Taking an even shorter cut to the code room by falling down the stairs, I contacted Station 53 on the direct line.

The operator was still on the air, about to be asked to repeat the message. I told the signalmaster to cancel the instruction and send the Morse equivalent of 'Piss off fast.'

Breaking that indecipherable to the applause of my public meant far more to me at the time than that factory in remotest Vermok which Skinnarland had described in minutest detail. The rest of SOE remained equally remote.

The most distinguished visitors to our mews stronghold were the night duty officers who collected the confidential waste and the ladies who pushed around the teatrolley twice a day like sisters of mercy. But one afternoon I was struggling with yet another indecipherable from Skinnarland, who was rapidly becoming my least favourite agent, when I heard an uncommonly authoritative, disconcertingly purposeful barrage of footsteps coming our way. A moment later an RAF officer strode into the room and commandeered it without a word being spoken. I had never seen anger of such quality and substance, power and purpose as this man projected. It should have been weighed by the pound and sold as an example.

I forgot about Skinnarland as he advanced on my startled superior, making no attempt to conceal his repugnance at a pink slip (an internal message to Station 53) which was clutched in his outstretched hand.

'Who's responsible for sending this?'

'He is.'

The flight lieutenant transferred his attention to me, and his first question set the tone of our encounter: 'Who the devil are you?'

Every officer in SOE was allocated a symbol for use in correspondence; Dansey's was DYC, Owen's DYC/0. At last I had a chance to use mine. 'DYC/M,' I said, quoting it with relish.

'Tony had a sked at nine tonight. You've bloody cancelled it.! Why?'

Tony was an agent stranded in France with the Gestapo searching for him. A Lysander was standing by to pick him up, but his message giving map references had been indecipherable. He was due to repeat it.

'I cancelled it,' I said, 'because an hour ago we broke it after three thousand, one hundred and fifty-four attempts.'

Skinnarland's indecipherable whispered something to me in its coding sleep.

'How did you break it?'

A word was forming which could be 'mountain'.

'HOW DID YOU BREAK IT?'

It was 'mountain'.

'By guess and by God,' I said without looking up.

'Really, DYC/M? And which were you?'

'Barren mountain'—I hoped it would make sense to Wilson.

'Flight Lieutenant, if you come back in a year's time I may have finished this bugger, and I'll be glad to answer all your questions.'

'Very well, DYC/M. I'll look in again the Christmas after next, if you haven't won the war by then.'

He closed the hangar door behind him. I could still feel him looking at me.

'Who was that sod?'

'Didn't you know? That's Yeo-Thomas. Our Tommy!… he's quite a character.'

I didn't realize it at the time but 'quite a character' was even more of an understatement than 84's tax returns.

SOE's security checks were so insecure that I thought the real ones were being withheld from me. Their function was to tell us whether an agent was coding under duress. To convey this to us without the enemy being aware of it, he was required to insert various dummy letters in the body of each message—and their absence or alteration in any way was supposed to alert us immediately to his capture. As an additional 'precaution' he was instructed to make deliberate spelling mistakes at prearranged spots. The whole concept had all the validity of a child's excuses for staying up late, with none of the imagination. It took no account of the possibility of an agent's code being broken or tortured out of him, when the Gestapo would be in a position to work out the security checks for themselves. Nor did it make any allowances for Morse mutilation, which frequently garbled so much of the text that it was impossible to tell whether the security checks—for what little they were worth—were present, I had already been puzzled by the traffic of a Dutch agent named Abor who'd been dropped into Holland in March. He'd sent a string of properly encoded messages—yet all of them were marked security checks omitted, and he'd clearly made no attempt to use them from the moment he'd arrived. When I raised this with N (the Dutch) section I was told there was nothing to worry about 'The whole thing has been looked into; the agent's all right.' There was so much else to worry about that I put this enigma on one side.

I had discovered that through no fault of anyone's (a rare situation in SOE) an agent could have a long period of waiting between leaving his training school and being dispatched to the field. His 'refresher course in coding' was left to his original training officer, if he wasn't too busy, or to his country section briefing officer, if he knew how to code. In case this accounted for the high rate of indecipherables, I raised a mortgage on my confidence and offered to brief agents myself.

Word spread quickly that someone in SOE was volunteering for extra labour, and my panel practice came of age when Buckmaster asked me to brief two F section agents named, respectively, Peter and Paul. Feeling like a pill-pusher with Messianic pretensions, I reported to F section's Orchard Court flat to meet my first pupils. Peter's surname was Churchill—and thanks to a briefing from Owen I knew far more about him than he about me. This slender man, coiled in his chair like an exclamation mark with a moustache, had got into the habit of slipping across to the South of France, usually by submarine and canoe, and staying there as long as Buckmaster and circumstances would permit. I had no idea what Peter's new mission was but he seemed no more concerned about it than a day-tripper with some business on the side. The prospect of the South of France had put him in a holiday mood and it was with some reluctance that he interrupted it for a 'spot of coding'.

Within the next five minutes he made as many mistakes. I asked him to stop, which he did with alacrity. I knew that Peter had left Cambridge with a degree in modern languages and the reputation of being one of the finest ice-hockey blues the university had produced. Hoping to establish common ground, I discussed the 'language of coding', the rules of its 'grammar', the nature of its 'syntax'. I told him that he 'spoke coding' with a bloody awful accent which would give him away, and then switched metaphors. We chose five words of his poem and lined them up as if they were members of his hockey team, and I asked him for both our sakes to remember where the goal was. He skated through two messages without one false pass and was about to try a third when he received a phone call from Buckmaster.

'Yes, Maurice?… meet who?… his name's what?… (I was sure he could hear but being difficult was a sport for which he'd also won a blue) but Maurice, I'm still having a hockey lesson from Marks… all right then, if I must.'

He apologised for having to leave at half-time, promised not to get sent off for foul coding, and hurried away.

I went next door and met my first frightened agent.

When Paul and I shook hands they needed galoshes. He seemed even more of a refugee from the civil war of adolescence than I was. He was English but spoke French like a native and was due to be dropped into France in a few nights' time. He showed me a message he'd been working on. He'd found a way to go wrong which not even Skinnarland had thought of. He'd started by encoding his message quite normally, then switched to the process reserved for decoding it—which was like straddling two escalators going in opposite directions. This was after eight weeks of training. I took him through the whole system from beginning to end and he understood it perfectly, which was even more worrying.

He suddenly asked what would happen if he made 'a bit of a mistake' and sent us a message which we couldn't decode.

I didn't want him to know that he'd be dependent on me. I improvised a little and told him that we had a team of girls who'd been specially trained to break indecipherable messages. Each girl, I said, 'adopted' an agent so that if he made a mistake or two in his messages, she'd be familiar with his coding style. I then asked him to run through his poem for me and took out his code-card to check the wording. He shyly admitted that Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' was his favourite poem, and that he was grateful to his instructor for allowing him to use it. He added that he was afraid someone else might have picked it first. He was silent for a few moments and then whispered the words I wasn't sure to whom:

Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust;
And time, a maniac scattering dust,
And life, a fury slinging flame.

Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.

Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.

I was careful to keep looking at the code-card. There was nothing more that I could say to him. But there was one thing that I could do.

Without telling anyone, I ordered a car and went to meet the coders of Grendon. Every girl in the code room at Station 53 could have walked out of her job at a month's notice. They were all in the FANY, a volunteer organization whose members could resign at will. The average age of these girls was twenty, though there was a sprinkling amongst them of watchful matriarchs, and most of them had been selected as coders on an arbitrary basis because they happened to be available when coders were wanted. After the briefest training they were dispatched to one of the most secret establishments in England and left to get on with it. They were never allowed to meet the agents whose traffic they handled and who were only code-names to them. The Gestapo had no more reality for these girls than when they'd joined the FANY.

As I opened the door of the lecture room, forty of them stood to attention. I wasn't sure how to get them to sit down again and made a vaguely royal gesture which had no immediate effect. I walked up to the blackboard at the far end of the room, wrote out a message in code which I hoped was legible and turned to face them.

It was the first time I'd ever given a lecture except to the one or two girls I'd taken out. I wasn't prepared for their impact en masse. I spotted two gigglers at the back of the room and talked only to them for the first five minutes—about agents in the field and the risks they took to send messages to us. I quoted verbatim from a telegram Dansey had shown me only two nights ago about a Yugoslav partisan, eighteen years old, who had been caught with a wireless transmitter, had refused to betray the organizer whose messages he was sending and was eventually taken to the mortuary 'no longer recognizable as a human being'. They didn't handle Yugoslav traffic. There was a sudden urgency in that room to handle the Gestapo.

I asked them to help break the message on the blackboard as if they were the Gestapo; I showed them what enemy cryptographers would look for if they had intercepted the message. I began to anagram and asked them to join in. They were shy at first—but soon suggestions were being called out from all round the room and those from 'the gigglers' were amongst the brightest. I reserved them for Paul.

It was oversimplified, of course, but it gave them the 'feel' of code breaking, and the principles they were shown were absolutely valid. I let them finish the message themselves. The clear-text read: 'From the coders of Grendon to the agents of SOE. there shall be no SUCH THING AS AN INDECIPHERABLE MESSAGE.'

I knew I would be overloading the girls if I continued but I couldn't resist it. I wanted them to see how the enemy would now mathematically reconstruct the five words on which the message had been encoded.

It took them twenty minutes to recover those words but no one could identify the rest of the poem. I spoke it to them in full: ' "Be near me when my light is low…"'

Two days later they sent me a message on the teleprinter: 'WE HAVE BROKEN OUR FIRST INDECIPHERABLE. THE CODERS OF GRENDON.'

I sent them a message of congratulations on behalf of all agents.

The pilot light in SOE's code room had started to burn.

By July '42 I felt sufficiently at home to rummage through the Top Secret documents on Dansey's desk while he and Owen were conferring with Ozanne. Remembering that 'You mustn't judge a book by its cover' was not only an agent's code-phrase but a Marks and Co. house rule, I ignored all the Top Secret documents, and selected for my further education an innocuous-looking folder which was lying in an in-tray.

It contained a prime collector's item: a Situation Report on the Free French, 'For Most Limited Distribution Only'. It soon became apparent even to my racing eyes that SOE and de Gaulle were too busy belittling each other's achievements to learn from each other's mistakes. The report also made clear that the in-fighting between de Gaulle and SOE had infected our policy-makers. They were unanimous that France was the life's blood of SOE but couldn't decide whether the formidable Frenchman should be treated as a valued ally or an internal haemorrhage. The sound of Dansey's footsteps stopped the rush of de Gaulle's blood to my head.