Between Silk and Cyanide (4 page)

The report made no reference to a concession which SOE had made to de Gaulle in the interests of Anglo-French relations. It was a concession which amounted to a licence to lose agents and in the midnight privacy of my cubbyhole I referred to it as 'the Free French fuck-up'.

It was otherwise known as General de Gaulle's secret code. Although de Gaulle, when he first occupied London in 1940, had had nothing he could call his own except France, and badly needed wireless facilities to tell her so, he had insisted at the outset of his negotiations with SOE that all Free French agents must be allowed to use a secret French code in addition to the one which SOE would provide.

Our embryonic organization, having to fight for its life in the Cabinet as well as in the field, didn't wish to risk losing the Free French forces without having had a chance to evaluate them, and agreed to the use of a secret French code on one condition: the clear-texts of all messages in this code were to be distributed at once to RF section which SOE had formed to deal exclusively with the Free French. General de Gaulle gave his undertaking, the principle was established and both sides agreed that there was to be no departure from it.

SOE then laid on a special drill to implement this decision which was sufficiently convoluted to keep all parties happy: whenever a message was received from the field with a prefix denoting that it was in secret French code, Station 53 teleprinted it to Dansey's distribution department—which then passed it to RF section, which then passed it to General de Gaulle's Duke Street headquarters, which then decoded it and passed it back en clair to RF section—which passed it back to DDD (Dansey's distribution department) for circulation.

Conversely, messages to the field were handed over in code to RF section, with the en clair texts, and RF section then passed them to DDD, which then transmitted the code messages to Station 53, which then transmitted them.

This had become accepted procedure and no one saw the slightest reason to disturb it. Nor had anyone in SOE raised the minor matter of what kind of code the Free French were using. I hoped that they kept it as secret from the Germans as they did from us.

I watched these messages passing through the code department like distinguished strangers. And what distinguished them more than anything else was that one out of every three was indecipherable. I wasn't allowed to break them, nudge Duke Street into breaking them, or provide any kind of first aid for them whatever.

They were de Gaulle's untouchables. And every one of them reduced our battle-cry 'There shall be no such thing as an indecipherable message' to the level of a good intention.

Nor did they promote mutual confidence at my briefing sessions with the Free French. It was hard to face the agents knowing that I could help them when they made mistakes in their British code, but must look the other way when they made them in their French. But, as Dansey firmly and sympathetically pointed out, it was de Gaulle's code; SOE had agreed to cede all jurisdiction over it, and the decision was irreversible. He advised me, though it had the force of an order, 'to leave well enough alone'.

I enquired whether he meant 'sick enough alone' and turned to go.

'Keep up the good work,' he said.

The only good work I was party to was being done by the coders of Grendon, who regarded an agent's indecipherable as a personal affront and did their best to scratch its eyes out. They had begun performing with the precision of relay racers and, by passing the baton of indecipherables from one eager shift to another, had succeeded in breaking 80 per cent of them within a few hours.

The bloody-minded ones which didn't respond, such as Einar Skinnarland's, they grudgingly passed on to me.

I visited the coders as often as I could to suggest quicker ways to the finishing post, to brief them about new agents, and because I enjoyed the illusion of their undivided attention. Unfortunately during one of these visits I was in the middle of explaining that the Free French were the only agents burdened with a secret code of which de Gaulle allowed us to know nothing, and that the strain of having to use two systems caused the agents to send an inordinate number of indecipherables in their British codes when Ozanne waddled in on a state visit. I immediately stopped referring to a forbidden subject but His Signals Majesty summoned me to his office to declare my interest.

I explained that indecipherables in secret French code had shot up by an alarming 12 per cent, and that Duke Street seemed to make no effort to break them. I then broke off on compassionate grounds as Ozanne's complexion had suddenly begun to match the colour of his tabs and I suspected that his blood pressure had shot up by an alarming 100 per cent. He left me in no doubt whatever that if I wanted to keep my job I was never again to discuss, question or even about the secret French code. It was entirely de Gaulle's business and anyone who didn't understand this had no place in the Signals directorate. He reminded me that I was there 'simply to keep an eye on agents' traffic', and was kind enough to add that he had heard good reports about me from Pollock and Dansey. He then assured me that if I had any important problems, I could always bring them direct to him.

A week later a Free French wireless operator was captured by the Gestapo while he was still on the air. He had begun to sign off after transmitting a message 250 letters long with a prefix denoting that it was in secret French code. Duke Street released the text of this message early next morning. It was a repeat of an indecipherable he had sent a week earlier and ended with an apology from the agent for his mistake in coding.

I waited until Dansey and Owen had left, then locked the door of my office and set about unlocking de Gaulle's secret code. My first step was to select a dozen outgoing messages in secret code, a dozen incoming, and compare them with the en clair texts which Duke Street had sent us.

This was not an exercise in cryptography. With the facilities at my disposal it was a game of Scrabble played with General de Gaulle's counters.

I gave the secret French code the nudge it needed.

I couldn't, or wouldn't, believe the result.

There was no secret French code. The Free French were passing all their traffic in the British poem-code and disguising it from us by using a secret indicator system.

Whenever Duke Street and an agent communicated with each other in 'secret' French code, they chose five words from their British poemcode and encoded their message in the usual way. The difference was that they used their secret indicator system to inform each other but conceal from SOE—which words they had chosen.

Technically it meant that SOE's fragile poem-codes were being used for two sets of traffic, when they could scarcely stand the strain of one. As an additional side-effect, every time an indecipherable was re-encoded in 'secret' French code it would be so easy for the interception service to identify that the operator was virtually advertising his whereabouts in neon-lit Morse.

I could see only one answer to this and set about providing it. I worked out the secret indicator system of every Free French agent, and got a timetable from Grendon of their wireless schedules so that I could be ready to decode the secret French traffic the moment it arrived.

I now had to lay on a special procedure sufficiently simple to avoid arousing suspicion. This was the high-risk part of the operation.

The teleprinter operators were used to my wandering into their office brooding over indecipherables, thinking up poems or cadging tea. I told the supervisor that Duke Street had been complaining about mutilations in traffic from the field and that, in future, I had to check all incoming messages in secret French code before they were sent to Duke Street. She didn't question this at all and handed me a message in secret French code which had just come in from Salmon's operator. I reeled Salmon's code-conventions into the lavatory for maximum privacy, looked up his secret French indicator, applied it and found that the message was perfectly encoded, remembered to pull the chain and returned it to the distribution department within ten minutes.

It was the start of an interception service which I expected to be blown at any moment, but once the drill was established the girls never questioned it.

As soon as a message was received from the field in 'secret' French code, I collected it for 'checking' and deciphered it before Duke Street had a chance to see it. If it was properly encoded, it was sent round to them at once. If it turned out to be indecipherable, I broke it as quickly as I could and then re-encoded it accurately in secret French code so that Free French headquarters could read their own traffic. It was at worst only a fringe infringement of de Gaulle's privacy. Fortunately for the resources of a one-man code room the proportion of messages sent in secret French code was small (a little over 5 per cent) and my main problem in handling the traffic was that I was far too careless ever to have offered myself a job. On one humiliating occasion I broke an indecipherable, made a mistake in re-encoding and sent Duke Street an indecipherable of my own. None of the messages in 'secret' French code were operational: they were always confined to political or administrative matters. Why de Gaulle had made such an issue of using this code was none of my business. Being accurate was.

One night I was engaged in this particular labour of hate when, without any warning, the head of SOE walked in. He was known to his organization as 'CD', a tiny symbol to embrace so vast a man. Despite his size, Sir Charles Hambro could move very quietly and was prone to prowl corridors. His tours of inspection were always unexpected. He had seen a light on in my office and had come to investigate.

Sir Charles looked at me intently, as if trying to recall where he had seen me before. I willed him one of my blockages. CD didn't know it, but we were neighbours. He had taken a flat in Park West, a Hambro-sized block in Edgware Road, which for him was only a stride away from Baker Street. My parents and I had lived there since the building had first opened, a comment on its durability. Our flat overlooked Sir Charles's and we had an excellent view of his bathroom window. CD was very security-minded when the black-out was on but relaxed his vigilance the moment it wasn't. We frequently had the privilege of watching the oversized banker wedged in his undersized bath, and Father suggested that he farted his way out.

It was in a very much larger bath that CD had watched a gymkhana of my own.

Park West had a swimming pool with a special facility for those requiring even more rigorous exercise than that on offer in their one-room flats. It consisted of thirty or so ropes suspended from the ceiling with steel rings attached to the ends of them. These ropes stretched across the entire length of the pool, a few feet above the water. To cultivate the muscles necessary for my dealings with the Signals directorate, I swung across these ropes forty or fifty times a morning with obsessive regularity. To vary the monotony, and because it was the only physical risk I had yet taken in the war, I frequently performed this exercise fully clothed. One particular morning I was swinging happily from ring to ring like a trainee gorilla, with my gas mask dangling from my shoulder and my bowler hat jammed firmly over my eyes, when I peered up at the balcony to see the head of SOE staring down at me with riveted astonishment. I was taught manners at St Paul's, if nothing else, tried to raise my hat, and seconds later gazed respectfully up at him from the bottom of the pool.

Now, as he filled the doorway of my office, I was once again in the deep end. There were one or two items on my desk which CD must on no account see. I stood up, which made no appreciable difference to the view, and introduced myself. CD's bald head hovered over my desk like a barrage balloon over suspect territory. I believed that most merchant bankers were bent and hoped that this one couldn't read backwards. He sat down and enquired what I was doing.

'Breaking an indecipherable, sir.'

'Oh? An indecipherable. Oh. Whose?'

'His code-name's Asparagus, sir. He's one of Major Buckmaster's agents.'

The broken indecipherable lying in front of me contained several references to 'mon general' which CD was unlikely to mistake for Maurice Buckmaster of F section even at the end of his longest day. CD expressed interest in seeing the message and held out a giant hand. There was nothing I could do but shake it. Prompt diversionary action was necessary. I grabbed a sheet of paper covered in figures and ash, told him that these were my calculations for breaking the message and proceeded to improvise a mathematical explanation. The figures were, in fact, my attempts to work out my monthly salary after the finance department had deducted tax. Fortunately CD was quite prepared to believe that codes were beyond him. A few moments later he professed himself very impressed by what he had seen and got up to go. I had no wish to delay him.

'I was under the impression,' CD said quietly, 'that Asparagus was Dutch.'

I felt like melted butter.

He was right, of course. Vegetables such as Cucumber, Broccoli and Kale were code-names for Dutch agents, who had been very much on my mind that day. The ineptitude of this lie to CD was the moment of truth for the shape of codes to come. It convinced me, and I could never go back on it, that the traditional theory that all agents must memorize their codes was totally wrong.

If a healthy 'swinging' young man, in no danger at all except from himself, could allow his unconscious to express its tensions in a lie which even his dear old dad would have seen through, then how much worse must it be for agents under duress struggling to remember their false names, their imaginary families and the hundreds of other detailed lies on which their survival depended. I was determined to give them a code which would protect them instead of their having to protect it, or I would leave SOE.

I cleared what remained of my throat. 'Do the country sections ever admit if their agents are caught?'

That held him, and he asked me what I meant. Unsure of how much of this would be filtered back to Ozanne, I said that the security checks SOE was using seemed to be very unreliable; and it was curious that although certain agents, particularly the Dutch, consistently omitted their security checks their country sections ignored the implication that they might have been caught.