by Leo Marks
‘We were,’ said Owen. ‘We have others now.’
They looked at each other. Something seemed to occur to them simultaneously. They operated like two ends of a teleprinter.
‘Come with us, Marks.’
The three of us crowded into my workroom, which by now resembled an indoor tobacco plantation. Dansey didn’t smoke. After a few moments of intensive rummaging he lifted a pyramid of papers and pointed to a blue card with a code typed on it in capital letters. He smiled as he held it up. His efficiency was vindicated.
I walked up to him till I was level with the pips on his shoulder. I had a request to make and, for the first time in far too long, it wasn’t wholly self-interested. ‘May I see those other codes, sir?’
The Baker Street code room, which Dansey and Owen ran with an efficiency and precision ‘Uncle Simon’ would have envied, was essentially a main-line code room. Its function was to communicate with embassies and base stations around the world using code books and one-time pads which provided the highest possible level of security and were cryptographically unbreakable even by Tiltman. It was the luxury end of the business.
The agents in the field had to use their codes in conditions of difficulty and danger which were unique in the history of coding. Their traffic was handled in that main-line code room by anyone available to do it. The volume of main-line traffic allowed no specialisation. Each girl had to be a multi-purpose coder, able in theory to switch from main-line traffic to agents’ at a moment’s notice, though the system called for very different aptitudes, attitudes and disciplines.
The responsibility for both main-line and agents’ codes was vested in Dansey and Owen. Each of them had an asset which was rare in SOE – the ability to know what he was best at doing. They had repeatedly tried to persuade SOE that agents’ traffic needed a cryptographer to supervise it – and permission had finally been given to add one to the staff. His brief, as SOE conceived it, was a simple one. All he would be required to do was ‘keep an eye on the security of agents’ traffic’ – and perhaps break one or two of the indecipherable messages which poured in from the field.
The agents were using poems for their codes. Or famous quotations. Or anything they could easily remember. This concept of clandestine coding had been adopted by SOE because of a theory, traditional in Intelligence, that if an agent were caught and searched it was better security if his code were in his head. I had a gut feeling right from the start that this theory was wrong, and hoped that whoever advised SOE that the poem-code was suitable for agents would try performing its paper gymnastics in the field.
The slightest mistake in the coding, a second’s lapse of concentration, would render the entire message indecipherable. Frequently as much as 20 per cent of SOE’s traffic could not be decoded due to agents’ errors.
Whenever SOE received an indecipherable the agent responsible was instructed to re-encode it and have it ready for his next transmission.
I was prepared to fight this malpractice by whatever means I could.
If some shit-scared wireless operator, surrounded by direction-finding cars which were after him like sniffer dogs, who lacked electric light to code by or squared paper to code on – if that agent hadn’t the right to make mistakes in his coding without being ordered to do the whole job again at the risk of his life, then we hadn’t the right to call ourselves a coding department.
Surely the answer was simple? Squads of girls must be specially trained to break agents’ indecipherables. Records must be kept of the mistakes agents made in training – they might be repeating them in the field. SOE would need more coders – and would have to compete for them in the far-from-open market. There must be no such thing as an agent’s indecipherable.
Dansey didn’t disagree with any of this. He simply pointed out a major obstacle of which I knew nothing. The name of that obstacle was Chain of Command.
All SOE’s communications were under the control of the Signals directorate. Since these communications were worldwide, this empire-builder’s paradise embraced main-line and agents’ codes, all wireless stations, all wireless training schools, all wireless equipment – and one or two research establishments which no one had found time to visit.
The head of the Signals conglomerate, Colonel Ozanne, was a problem to which no solution compatible with law was remotely in sight. A one-man obstacle course, the colonel was opposed to any kind of change except in his rank. He elected to concentrate on main-line communications whilst taking an ‘overall view’ of everything else, though he often had difficulty in focusing his viewfinder, especially after lunch. His second in command, Colonel George Pollock, controlled the wireless stations, the training schools and agents’ communications generally. This hierarchical structure put Dansey in the delicate position of being answerable to Ozanne for main-line codes and to Pollock for agents’.
Pollock’s peacetime occupation posed problems of a special kind. He was a highly successful barrister who’d been well on his way to becoming a judge, and he used the Signals directorate as an extension of his chambers. All Dansey’s requests were subjected to litigation and the verdict invariably went against him. Though Dansey never hesitated to stand up and be frequency-counted, he was in every respect outranked. The colonel disliked the untidy conveyancing which placed Dansey under his command but not under his control and had made several attempts to take agents’ codes away from him, the last of which had almost succeeded.
Dansey warned me that I must do nothing which would give him an excuse to try again. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘you must go very carefully until your appointment is confirmed. And, after that, old boy – you must go more carefully still.’
I managed to comply for two whole weeks.
*
Even SOE knew that for security reasons all messages to and from the field had to be at least two hundred letters long – one more dangerous disadvantage of the poem-code. The country section officers who originated messages had acquired the appalling habit of sending the same text to as many as a dozen different agents with only marginal changes of phrasing.
The poem-code simply couldn’t stand up to these mass-produced texts. If the enemy broke one agent’s messages they would know what to look for in their other intercepts – it would be an anagrammer’s delight.
I made my first contact with Buckmaster of the French section, Hardy Amies of the Belgian, Hollingsworth of the Danish, Blizzard of the Dutch, Wilson of the Norwegian and Piquet-Wicks of another French section, though I wasn’t yet sure why there had to be two. I asked them to paraphrase their messages and free their language whenever possible, and mistook their acquiescence for security-mindedness instead of the quickest way to get me off the telephone.
The next time I held out the begging bowl on behalf of the infirm poem-code was for a very different ailment, and the remedy was even less to their liking.
To encode a message an agent had to choose five words at random from his poem and give each letter of these words a number. He then used these numbers to jumble and juxtapose his clear text. To let his Home Station know which five words he had chosen, he inserted an indicator group at the beginning of his message. But if one message was broken – just one – the enemy cryptographers could mathematically reconstruct those five words and would at once try to identify their source.
Amongst SOE’s best-sellers were Shakespeare, Keats, Tennyson, Molière, Racine, Rabelais, Poe and the Bible.
One agent had been allowed to use the National Anthem, the only verses which he claimed to remember: suppose the enemy broke one of his messages and the five words he’d encoded it on were ‘our’, ‘gracious’, ‘him’, ‘victorious’, ‘send’, then God save the agent. They could sing the rest of the code themselves and read all his future traffic without breaking another message.
Even works less familiar to the Germans than the National Anthem – the Lord’s Prayer perhaps – would cause them no problems. Reference books are jackboots when used by cryptograp
hers. But if our future poem-codes were original compositions written by members of SOE, no reference books would be of the slightest help in tracing them. Not even Marks & Co.’s.
It would make it slightly more difficult for SOE’s messages to be read like daily newspapers if we started a Baker Street poets’ corner.
I hadn’t thought that writing poetry would be my contribution to Hitler’s downfall, but it would at least prevent the Germans from using our traffic for their higher education. Striding up and down the corridors like the Poet Laureate of Signals, I did what I could to make my poems easy to memorise, less easy to anticipate, but I was obliged to turn to the country sections for help with their respective languages. I again telephoned Messrs Buckmaster, Amies, Hollingsworth, Blizzard, Wilson and Piquet-Wicks and asked if they would kindly write some poetry for me in their respective languages.
Rumour began to spread that there was an outbreak of insanity in the Signals directorate.
It was well founded. Agents were making so many mistakes in their coding that breaking their indecipherables single-handed against the clock was like being the only doctor in a hospital full of terminal patients. And the biggest indecipherable of all was SOE itself.
Formal acceptance into the organisation had brought me no closer to understanding it. All it had produced was a pass of my own which I could rarely find and a desk in Owen’s office which I rarely left. Although the code room was only a few yards away, I seldom visited it as main-line codes were none of my business. All maimed agents’ messages were brought in to me, as the girls had neither the time nor the training to mend the fractures.
The prospect of ever being able to form a code-breaking team seemed even more remote when Dansey’s foreboding hardened into fact. Ozanne transferred all agents’ traffic to the wireless station at Grendon Underwood. The coding was to be done by groups of FANYs (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry). The takeover was to be in August, only a few weeks away. Dansey would still be in charge of agents’ codes – but this could be changed at the flick of a mood swing. He warned me not to visit Station 53 without the approval of the Gauleiter of Signals.
While grim power struggles were raging throughout every directorate in SOE, I was engaged in a still grimmer one with Edgar Allan Poe.
He was the favourite author of an officer on Buckmaster’s staff named Nick Bodington, who went backwards and forwards to France as if he had a private ferry. For this trip’s traffic he’d chosen an extract from ‘The Raven’. Bodington’s message was indecipherable and I’d been impaled on the bloody bird’s beak for six consecutive hours.
The passage Bodington had chosen was:
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping on my chamber door …
If the indicator group were correct, the five words he’d encoded the message on were: ‘came’, ‘chamber’, ‘my’, ‘rapping’, ‘door’. When I tried decoding it on these five, all that emerged was the Raven’s cackle.
Some three thousand attempts later I discovered that the indicator was correct and the coding perfect. All Bodington had done was omit a ‘p’ from ‘rapping’, which turned it into ‘raping’ and screwed the lot of us.
The worst part of these indecipherables was the time element. If an agent had a schedule for six o’clock, his message would have to be broken by then or his section head would insist that he repeated it. I didn’t always manage to beat the clock, but only once gave up trying.
I had been working for two days on an indecipherable from Norway contributed by an agent called Einar Skinnarland. There was something very peculiar about Skinnarland’s traffic. He gave some of his messages to a wireless operator to be transmitted in the normal way (SOE was blasé enough to regard wireless traffic as normal) – but, for reasons which the Norwegian section refused to divulge, at any rate to me, most of his traffic was smuggled into Sweden by courier and re-routed to London by cable or diplomatic bag. He had already sent one indecipherable, and the usually imperturbable Wilson had stressed to me that he must know its contents within the hour. An hour in coding terms is only a paranoid minute. I needed to know what was so special about Skinnarland’s traffic – but Wilson rang off abruptly to take another call.
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 mainline 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 tea trolley 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/O. 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 realise it at the time but ‘quite a character’ was even more of an understatement than 84’s tax returns.
Note
* 84 Charing Cross Road (André Deutsch, 1971).
TWO
The Pilot Light
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 despatched 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.
