Between Silk and Cyanide

by Leo Marks

  The fourth floor was Marks & Co.’s war room. Everything in it was locked away in bookcases whose doors it was impossible to see through. Behind the dark glass were thousands of coloured plates, title pages and frontispieces – spare parts which could be transplanted into any book which needed them, none of them more spare than I.

  What the hell am I doing hiding from Giskes in a bookshop?

  I said goodnight to Father, who inspected me thoughtfully to see what I’d borrowed. He warned me to make sure I closed the front door behind me as Cohen and Frank had already gone home. Presumably the two and sixpence had been accounted for.

  I hadn’t visited the basement but there wasn’t much point; I was in one already. Turning to the front door, I realised that for the first time in my life I had the shop to myself.

  I found myself sitting in the chair which Freud had once occupied, hoping that we might make contact through anal osmosis. I’d welcome his concept of a Plan Giskes.

  I looked at the table where he’d examined all that 84 could produce for him on the subject of Moses. There was a solitary book on it, and with the special conceit of those who roam bookshops in search of they know not what, I felt it was waiting for me.

  It was a reproduction of the 1455 Gutenberg Bible, the first book printed in movable type. I was drawn to all incunabula and would proclaim early printed books my personal duchy if ever I ascended to the throne of 84. I leafed through the Bible, surely the most comprehensive situation report ever written.

  Halfway through it I felt the beginnings of a Dutch buzz. Where was it coming from? – Gutenberg and Freud? What did the man who gave us movable type and the man who gave us immovable type-casting have to do with Herr Giskes?

  The buzz was in the stomach now, and it was similar to the one I’d had when I’d finished breaking Peter Churchill’s message.

  Freud, Gutenberg and Peter Churchill – what nonsense was this? … but for God’s sake and the Golf team’s cling on to whatever it is that’s trying to break through to you in your old man’s shop …

  The solution when it finally emerged was so obvious that the small boy who’d broken his first code on these premises would have spotted it at once and gone home for some pancakes.

  I knew now how to give the Germans a chance to go wrong.

  The idea was dangerous and could easily backfire. I would have to wait for exactly the right moment before launching it.

  But at last I knew what the right moment was.

  The benign bulldog was peeing on the pavement with stylish intensity. Doris was looking around as if to charge someone for the exhibition.

  I was tempted to have a short talk with her about Rudyard Kipling and one or two more pressing matters but Father was watching from the window.

  She examined me briefly then turned her attention to a better prospect.

  I said a silent thank you to the shop, which hadn’t yet failed me, and hoped that Plan Giskes wouldn’t fail it.

  Notes

  * Frank’s concept of personal service, which was altogether different from Doris’s, took on a new dimension when Helene discovered him in 1949.

  * So was the Foreign Office from time to time.

  SIXTEEN

  A Question of Y

  The February moon was due on the 14th of the month, and not even C could postpone it.

  Aware that the minister needed demonstrable results to put before the Cabinet, the whole of SOE was moonstruck – every country section, every service department setting out to prove that it could reach its stated targets. But there was one forlorn non-contributor to the frenetic countdown. As late as the morning of the 7th, I was still waiting to be told when the Arquebus, Gunnerside and Golf missions would spare time for their final code briefings; still waiting for Tiltman or some other expert to give his verdict on WOKs; and above all, still brooding over Plan Giskes – a brainchild with a missing chromosome.

  I’d discovered a stunt in its growth for which there was only one remedy, and it wasn’t likely to arrive in time to stop the Golf team from being despatched to Herr Giskes. No matter how costly the delay, I had to wait for the Dutch section to cancel a message to one of its agents. Then, and only then, could a trap be set for the Germans which even SOE might regard as conclusive.

  As the latest news arrived from the field, most of it bad, country sections often had to cancel messages which were already at the wireless station waiting to be transmitted. They then issued new ones, which were themselves subject to cancellation. But for a variety of reasons, some of them valid, they usually left it until the last possible moment to arrange these cancellations and twice in the past month overwrought country-section officers had contacted overworked Grendon signalmasters and cancelled the wrong ones.

  Determined to put a stop to this, Nicholls issued a memo to the country sections which was to have far wider repercussions than even he could foresee:

  TO ALL COUNTRY SECTIONS FROM MS/A

  Despite repeated requests to the contrary, when country sections need to cancel messages which have been sent to the wireless station for transmission to the field they are continuing to contact Grendon directly, often when an agent’s schedule has already begun. This practice must cease forthwith.

  In future country sections must notify all cancellations to the Headquarters Signals Office, and refer all requests for information to the Signals Office Supervisor or to a member of the Headquarters staff. I repeat there must be no further direct contact between country sections and the wireless station. A.R. [Acknowledgement required]

  This proclamation gave the station the seclusion it needed, ensured a better service for the country sections, and allowed the head of the Codes department to put it to uses for which it hadn’t been designed.

  I instructed the Signals Office supervisors that I was to be notified as soon as any country section cancelled a message to the field. I stressed any because I didn’t want them to realise that I was concerned only with the Dutch. The sooner that cancelled message was in my hands the more quickly I could prove that the Dutch Resistance was in Giskes’s.

  At the start of a week which I’d built round the briefing of the vital thirteen, Mr Einar Skinnarland put me to the test for the first time on the present premises.

  The great miscoder was still working in the Norsk Hydro at Vermok, still waiting for the Gunnerside and Grouse teams to mount their attack on it, still sending most of his messages (this was one of them) via the British legation in Stockholm. His latest indecipherable had travelled well and its bouquet filled the office for most of the morning. It was vintage Skinnarland and its text was as heady as its coding. Skinnarland warned London that unless the attack on the plant took place during the next moon period the Germans would be ready to start shipping large quantities of heavy water to Berlin.

  I read the clear-text to Wilson over the scrambler and he shipped large quantities of appreciation. He then added something which mattered: the Gunnersides would be available for briefing in two days’ time.

  A few seconds later Duke Street telephoned: the Arquebus mission would be available for briefing in two days’ time.

  Killick was the next to telephone: the Dutch agents would be available for briefing in two days’ time.

  The verdict on WOKs was also expected in two ds’ t.

  I decided to spend the next forty-eight hours thinking only about Holland.

  Setting a trap for Giskes was in itself a trap; so much could go wrong. Convinced that while I was having buzzes in my head the Dutch agents were having buzz-saws put between their teeth. I found it hard to think dispassionately. Yet it was never more necessary. The greatest problem of all was my superiors’ responses to Plan Giskes.

  Although I still didn’t understand SOE-mindedness, I would stake the future of WOKs that if I disclosed my intentions the plan would be aborted. This was more than a buzz; it was a total conviction. I had to decide whether to launch the plan without authority and risk the consequences or abandon
it and try to think of another, and until I’d resolved the dilemma it would be unfair to brief a single agent, let alone thirteen.

  And there was a moral issue. Did I have the right to risk the lives of captured agents who’d be no further use to Giskes if he saw through the plan and realised that we suspected they were blown?

  In the absence of a coin I tossed my conscience, which weighed far less than the sixpence I lacked, and it produced a generalisation – the most that could be expected from such a rarely used source: I must do whatever gave the greatest possible number of agents the best possible chances of survival.

  This meant going it alone, which had one insuperable drawback. My inexperience.

  I badly needed technical guidance from Nicholls and Heffer but daren’t ask them for it because once they knew what the plan entailed they’d be duty-bound to ask CD and Gubbins (and possibly the Dutch) for ‘permission to proceed’, and it would be safer to seek it from Giskes.

  Yet there was certain information which I had to have, and if I couldn’t get it by picking brains I might have to pick locks.

  There was a document in Nick’s desk which I was determined to see. During my critical debate with him about the perfection of the Dutch agents’ coding he’d frequently glanced at a distinctive grey folder unlike any that I’d seen in SOE. By consulting this folder he’d been able to state quite categorically that the Dutch WT operators who’d previously been transmitting from The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam were now sending their traffic from Eindhoven, Utrecht and Arnhem (as their messages proclaimed). He’d also been able to pinpoint the districts in these towns from which the traffic was being sent as well as the dates, times and frequencies of every transmission.

  I’d wondered ever since where that folder had come from but now had to do much more than wonder. It was essential to find out not only the folder’s origins but what other information it contained, and my one slender hope (apart from petty larceny) was the menaces whose office I was obliged to share.

  I glanced across at them as they huddled together in menace territory preparing for a session with Nick. It would be useless to ask them outright as they’d never volunteer anything he didn’t want me to know; I’d have to devise a ‘Plan Menace’.

  I escaped to the privacy of the loo with a message in secret French code, and a few minutes later was able to thank le bon Dieu that it had been properly encoded. Returning to the comparative civilisation of the office, I saw not only one distinctive grey folder but a whole pile of them being carried towards me in the menaces’ arms, the safest strongboxes in Baker Street. I held open the door for them and took advantage of their astonishment to make my bid. Targeting Mrs Brewis, the more maternal of the two, I asked if the folders had come from the stationery department, as they had pockets inside and would be useful for carrying WOKs if the occasion should ever arise.

  She said she hoped that it would, but no, they didn’t come from the stationery department but they very soon might as Nick had got so used to them when he was working at Y. After a sharp glance from her sister menace she left the room in disgrace. She had given me the largest tip ever received by a doorman, but I’d have some difficulty in spending it as I hadn’t even heard of Y, let alone the fact that Nick used to work there.

  The person who could enlighten me about Y never appeared until the menaces had left, and his timing didn’t fail him today.

  As Heffer entered the room in his customary slow motion, I at once asked him what Y did. Like all gurus he could only be startled by other gurus but he did have to shelter for a moment behind his ‘what have we here?’ expression.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said. There was a long pause while he lit a cigarette and gazed out of the window at the nether regions of Norgeby House. It was impossible to tell whether he intended to answer. ‘Well, well,’ he repeated, and kept me in suspense for a puff or two longer.

  Twenty minutes and as many surprises later I knew that I’d asked my first sensible question of 1943.

  In the early thirties, when Top Secret meant what it said, Y was the pinnacle of the Top Secret list and, officially, didn’t exist. Y specialised in logging diplomatic, military and other sensitive wireless traffic through its worldwide chain of listening posts, and in monitoring cable and wireless traffic from embassies. Because of the nature of its work, Y was staffed by technicians of exceptionally high calibre, many of whom were recruited from the Post Office engineers. Y worked closely with C but was an independent arm under the control of the chief signalmaster of the Royal Corps of Signals. Heffer said this with noticeable pride. Nick had been a member of Y since the mid-thirties and had been responsible for setting up outstations in Palestine and India. In 1938 Y had been able to intercept high-speed Russian wireless traffic using special equipment which was still on the secret list. Heffer pointed out that because of Russia’s vast size and poor communications, Moscow had to depend almost entirely on wireless for maintaining contact with its outlying territories. In the same year (1938) Y had monitored the wireless traffic of the German armed forces while Hitler was still declaring his peaceful intentions. Y’s then head had privately briefed Churchill about the military build-up, but the great man wasn’t yet in office and no one took him seriously but Hitler. Soon after the briefing Churchill thundered a warning to Parliament without disclosing his sources.

  Y’s impact on the war was immediate, massive and ongoing. Warning me that he knew only the fringes of its activities, Heffer said that Y was monitoring vast quantities of enemy and Allied traffic with equal dispassion, forecasting the battle plans of Panzer divisions from the volume of traffic passing between units, and logging the wireless messages of German agents while they were still practising at their training schools in the fatherland.

  Glancing at my littered desk, Heffer added that Y was also expert at detecting ‘dummy traffic’ used for deception purposes. Glancing at my waste-paper basket, he commented that Y logged all WT traffic and retained it for future reference, no matter how insignificant it might have appeared at the time.

  Exhausted by his exposition, he sat down and studied my face too closely for comfort – his as well as mine.

  Blowing a smoke ring, a warning that something especially important was about to emerge, he told me that Y sent most of its intercepted material to Bletchley for breaking or to C for information. Access to Y’s archive was strictly limited to British organisations, as it was logging Allied as well as enemy traffic. One smoke ring suppurated into another and there was a pause.

  He was on the point of adding something when I made the mistake of saying, ‘What, Heff?’ He shook his head, retreated inside it and could no longer be monitored even by Y.

  I knew that the next few minutes could determine the outcome of Plan Giskes and that there must be no more involuntary ‘What, Heff?’s. If it were Y’s policy to log all WT traffic ‘no matter how insignificant it might have appeared at the time’, then somewhere in its massive archive there might be copies of the early Dutch code groups which C claimed to have sent us.

  There was no point in fencing with Heffer; he enjoyed it too much, knew me too well. I asked him outright how long it would take to set up a meeting with Y.

  He looked at me with an expression which reminded me of Father’s when a valued client once burned a hole in a sheet of Caxton and rose from his chair as if it were scorching him. He told me that such a meeting was out of the question, that Y never dealt with polyglot organisations like SOE, and that for both our sakes I must immediately forget this entire conversation.

  ‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘What have we here?’ I certainly didn’t have Heffer, because he’d closed the door behind him.

  But what did we have here?

  Why had he told me about Y in such detail if I couldn’t make the slightest use of it? Was there something he especially wanted me to know which he’d tucked away in guru fashion amongst his throwaway comments? If so, what was it?

  And if so plus one, what was so wron
g about wanting to ask a few questions of Y?

  There were thirteen agents to be briefed tomorrow. How many of them would we lose because C, Y and SOE, for all their brilliancies, hadn’t the common sense to make common cause?

  Someone in the corridor gave a raucous laugh.

  It was probably Herr Giskes.

  SEVENTEEN

  Arquebus, Gunnerside and Golf

  One of the most difficult tasks in SOE was persuading country sections to arrange appointments with agents. It was even more difficult persuading them to change them.

  But not for everyone.

  While I’d been skirmishing with Heffer, my red-haired right hand, Muriel, had rescheduled my entire briefing programme with humiliating ease. I was to see Arquebus and the Gunnersides in the morning and their Golf team in the afternoon. The lunch hour was reserved for contingencies.

  I had no idea what an arquebus was and looked it up in the dictionary. It was an early type of portable gun supported by a tripod. I knew that Tommy was the tripod and that the two big guns he was supporting were Colonel Passy, the head of the Free French secret service, and Pierre Brossolette, a founder-member of the Conseil National de la Résistance. It was typical of Tommy not to have mentioned that he was the first British officer ever to be invited to take part in a Free French mission, the biggest compliment Duke Street could pay an Englishman, especially one belonging to SOE.

  Since he was too modest or security-minded to discuss his role in Arquebus, I consulted Charlotte Denman for further and better particulars.

  The testy little menace understood the complexities of our rival French sections even better than she understood Nick’s and went to great lengths to prove it to me.