by Leo Marks
When I realised what I should have done I hit my forehead so hard I improved its shape.
As per my instructions from Gubbins, I took the problem to Nick. He listened sympathetically while I admitted my negligence but I hadn’t come for forgiveness. There might still be time to produce some bicycle tyres of our own, and I told him what I thought they should be.
He undertook to consult Gubbins immediately.
An hour later he authorised me to make an appointment with N section to explain the security precautions I wanted to take. But on no account must I discuss Plan Giskes, or disclose why I believed that Boni and most other Dutch agents were blown. He added that the independent enquiry into the situation in Holland had already begun.
I asked for an appointment with Killick and got one with Bingham. He listened so attentively that I had to double-lock my thoughts as I explained that I was a bit worried about the number of Victory messages which Boni was transmitting, especially in view of their importance. I was also worried that Victory might discuss the contents of his messages with some of his colleagues.
Bingham agreed that this was likely and asked what I had in mind. I suggested that Vinus should be warned that it was bad security for Victory’s traffic to be transmitted verbatim and that in future he must paraphrase each Victory message by putting it into his own words before it was encoded. I also suggested that he should insert eight random letters at the beginning and end of each message, and be reminded to use transposition keys at least eighteen letters long.
Bingham agreed to this at once, for which I could happily have stroked his pelt.
The message was transmitted to Boni on 18 March, and on the 20th he sent another Victory message. It didn’t seem to have been paraphrased but it might well have been encoded before London’s instructions were received.
The seven containers and the 10,000 florins (but no bicycle tyres) were dropped on the night of the 24th, and on the 25th Boni acknowledged their receipt. During this sked he received a message promising that the tyres would be despatched in the next moon period beginning 9 April. Golf surfaced for the first time on the 24th and announced that he was ready to start his regular skeds. London congratulated him and Broadbean on their safe arrival and advised them to take things quietly until they were sent further instructions.
On 30 March Ebenezer (who’d given up inserting stip-step-stap in his messages, probably in despair) was instructed to investigate the possibilities of sabotaging submarines with the help of the Catarrh group (number 173). An almost identical message had been sent to Boni on 25 March (number 68). And so everything in Holland seemed to be under control, and I didn’t doubt whose.
Without any warning an idea for a letter one-time pad fell into place, and two hours later I produced a working model which I christened a LOP.
I wanted Nick to be the first person to see it.
Racing to his office, I learned from the typing pool (the bestinformed body in SOE) that he’d been summoned to a meeting of the Executive Council and that his secretary was out walking her Pekinese, a permanent fixture we’d gladly have dispensed with.
I decided to leave the LOP on his desk with a note attached to it: ‘To MS/A from DYC/M. Permission to proceed?’ I was so elated that for the first time in years my handwriting was legible.
Nick’s desk was cluttered by his standards, immaculate by mine.
I placed the LOP in the centre of his blotter, where it might have a chance of jumping the queue, and wished I could have been there when he realised what it was.
I was about to tiptoe away when I spotted a grey folder on the top of his in tray. There was a sheet of paper protruding from it. It was covered in green ink, which Nick invariably used when compiling aides-mémoire of particular importance.
I considered writing another note: ‘To MS/A from DYC/M. Permission to read your aide-mémoire?’ Hoping that his meeting would last all morning, and that the Pekinese would pee the length and breadth of Baker Street, I opened the folder. It contained sheaves of notes in Nick’s flowing longhand.
One glance was enough.
They were headed ‘The Role of the Dutch Resistance on D-Day’, and I was as green as Nick’s ink by the end of page one.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Green Ink
Under the heading ‘Secret Army’ Nick made some astonishing disclosures. The Chiefs of Staff expected the secret army to be ready on D-Day to disrupt German communications with Holland, France and Belgium. They also expected it to delay the passage of German troops from Holland into France, to block the Rhine passages and to attack the Wehrmacht from the rear on a signal from the High Command.
And then the real shocks began.
Alanbrooke had become one of the principal supporters of SOE’s Plan Holland. In his view, ‘If the Dutch uprising could even partially paralyse the German forces on D-Day it would be a major contribution to Overlord.’ He’d therefore instructed SOE to give Holland’s requirements priority over all other country sections, including France. He’d also insisted that the secret army should stay completely under cover until D-Day began, ‘to preserve its security’.
Nick didn’t refer to the possibility that Giskes had become an honorary colonel in the secret army. Nor was he even mentioned by name. But I found Churchill’s name instead, and what Nick said about him increased my rising panic:
Churchill continues to have faith in SOE despite the efforts of Eden [the foreign secretary] to undermine it. The PM has given Plan Holland his full backing, and is relying on Morton to keep him informed of the secret army’s progress. Morton is well disposed to SOE but could be turned. Essential to retain his goodwill.
Morton’s name was new to me. I subsequently discovered that he was one of the PM’s most trusted advisers and chairman of the Committee on Allied Resistance.
The first welcome surprise was Churchill’s attitude to the Intelligence services:
Churchill suspects the Intelligence services of carefully doctoring any reports from the field which cast doubts on their efficiency and insists that they show them to Morton in their original form before he submits the important ones to him. SOE included in this.
A note in the margin read: ‘What show Morton re the secret army?’
I had to restrain myself from adding, ‘Why not my coding report?’
I realised how much Nick knew about Holland which he hadn’t told me, and how little I’d found out for myself.
The next page provided further confirmation.
The Chiefs are becoming increasingly anxious about Jambroes [Marrow]. Having approved his appointment as commander-in-chief of the secret army when he was dropped into Holland in July ’42 [June actually] they now want him recalled for urgent consultations, and are pressing to know the reasons for the delay. Morton equally anxious to see him in London. Their constant enquiries re news of Jambroes difficult for CD and Colin …
The next three lines were so heavily crossed out that they looked as if they’d been covered in green wallpaper. But what followed them was all too legible.
Colin has now informed the Chiefs that a support team has been dropped into Holland to expedite Jambroes’ return via French and Belgian escape lines. Confirmation received that agents arrived safely and being sheltered for next few days by reception committee.
The underlining was Nick’s, the reassurance about the Golf team was Boni’s.
All the best horror stories have tranquil patches, and after making a rough estimate of the number of sets, signal plans and codes the secret army would need for internal communication and for traffic with London, Nick resorted to some cryptic one-liners:
Blizzard to be replaced as head of N section? Who suitable take over …? Should reception committees be allowed in Holland? Surely blind drops safer? Same applies other territories! Has MVD (Dutch Intelligence Service) been penetrated? How London personnel recruited? C also concerned. Is Dutch government-in-exile communicating directly with Holland? Possibly via fleet? Major b
reach regulations if happening. How best looked into? C also suspicious but no help.
I dropped blind on to the last page. It was less than half full but the handwriting warned me that I’d landed on a minefield. Nick’s sloping letters were suddenly tense as if the vowels had backache.
The Chiefs of Staff have still not issued an official directive to SOE and, unless they do so within next few weeks, fear C will have a field day. The importance of our terms of reference being formally defined is to be raised yet again at Cabinet level but much will depend on Plan Holland’s progress …
The final paragraph was in block capitals.
SELBORNE [SOE’s minister] DOING WHAT HE CAN TO LOBY MORTON BUT MORTON SEEMS TO REGARD HIM AS LIGHTWEIGHT. SITUATION NOW CRITICAL, AND UNTIL IT IS RESOLVED IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT SOE CONTINUES ITS EFFORTS TO …
And that’s where it ended.
Its efforts to what, Nick? – to conceal from the Chiefs and Morton that Boni’s traffic is blown, that the secret army might no longer be a secret, and that Plan Holland might have to be aborted?
Is that why four Boni-linked agents were despatched last week? And why three more are being sent in next? – because if the drops were cancelled the Chiefs and Morton would demand to know the reasons?
All this for the sake of a directive they might never issue? – and which they’d withhold till 84 gave its books away if we failed them in Holland?
Of all the territories on which the mandate depended, why in God’s name did it have to be the Netherlands?
No wonder my Dutch report got the reception it did.
No wonder Tiltman must know nothing of it.
But this kind of wondering was the equivalent of thinking with a stammer …
I told myself to hold on a minute, though I wasn’t sure to what.
Nick was the only prop I had, and I’d begun to lose confidence in him. He was fighting what was surely his last war (if it weren’t, we were engaged in a farce), and was hoping to be appointed head of the Signals directorate. No one deserved promotion more but how far would he go to secure it? Would he abuse his knack of making authoritative statements which brooked no contradiction (an ability rare amongst signals officers unless very junior)? Would he say what he was told to about Holland to help SOE retain the tenuous confidence of the Chiefs of Staff? – would he condone a burial day for the Dutch to avert a field day for C?
Not the Nick I knew, and I was ready to stake Tommy’s survival on it. But what about the Gubbins I didn’t know?
Everything I’d sensed about him at our meeting, and had learned about him since, convinced me that he wouldn’t either – not the spiky little bastard with an MC on his tunic and an Intelligence department in his head which Tommy regarded as the greatest asset our agents had.
Then why were Boni-linked operations still being mounted? – had the enquiry into Dutch security already taken place and made nonsense of my ‘proof’? – or did SOE have a Dutch master plan I couldn’t even guess at? Remembering Gubbins’s words, ‘A lot goes on in SOE you know nothing about,’ I realised that the time had come for me to issue myself with a directive which I’d be bound by for as long as I was in charge of agents’ codes.
I would stop trying to understand SOE-mindedness, it was an indecipherable to which I’d never find the key. I would give up questioning SOE’s plans, policies and operations, they too were beyond me. I would stick to what I did least badly. I would give SOE’s agents the safest possible codes, the most efficient coders and a team of FANY officers they would find it a pleasure to be briefed by.
But in my own dealings with agents I would substitute technique for involvement. I would attack their indecipherables, watch their security checks and do whatever was necessary to safeguard their traffic. But the content of that traffic must be left to those who understood it.
I replaced the aide-mémoire in its folder and left the desk exactly as I’d found it. But I couldn’t bring myself to leave the LOP where it rightfully belonged.
I had nothing else to cling to in a green-ink world.
TWENTY-NINE
Best Read at Night
Throughout March we were Morse-stunned by the traffic which poured into the wireless station at Grendon (now called 53a) and to our new station at Poundon (53b)
Tommy had sent three messages. The first two described the efforts he, Passy and Brossolette were making to weld dissident resistance groups into a secret army under one field commander, but it was his third which earned him a box of the finest.
He’d discovered that under a compulsory service order all Frenchmen were required to register their dates of birth, and those aged between nineteen and thirty-two were sent to Germany to work in factories or were despatched to the Russian front. Those who failed to register were hunted by the French and German police working in unison, and he estimated that every week at least twenty thousand Frenchmen were picked up on the streets of Paris, put into lorries and sent to Germany. He was convinced that the age limit would soon be raised to forty-two, and then to the middle fifties, and that when this happened there’d be little or no hope of forming a secret army.
He suggested to London that all Frenchmen should be encouraged by radio broadcasts, underground newspapers and every conceivable form of propaganda to avoid conscription by leaving France or by living clandestinely. Few would be able to manage the former but the latter course should be open to all if they were given sufficient help. He urged London to send large quantities of francs and forged ration cards so that all who deserted could buy food. He was convinced that if London responded quickly, Frenchmen would desert in their tens of thousands, perhaps to the hills, where they could be provisioned by London, trained and formed into the nucleus of a secret army.
The concept of the Maquis had effectively been born.
But much of the March traffic was best read at night, when wincing could be more private. Messages from Norway and Stockholm described the atrocities carried out by the Gestapo and the Quisling government on Norwegian citizens in the Hardanger area as retribution for the successful attack on the heavy-water plant. Homes had been burnt, women and children arrested, and hundreds of innocent people taken hostage and sent to concentration camps. The nine saboteurs were still safe.
Flemming Muus had replaced Mogens Hammer as head of Danish Resistance, and Hammer had been recalled to London and promised an important new post when he returned to Denmark – though Hollingsworth had no intention of sending him back. Olaf Lippmann, a young Dane who’d worked for the Resistance since its inception and set up the first clandestine newspapers as well as the escape lines to Sweden, and was now in charge of political intelligence, would not only be Muus’s principal assistant, he could take over for him at a moment’s notice. (He eventually did.)
On the night of the 22nd Cammaerts the plodder (code-named Roger) lumbered into a Lysander with his fellow agent Dubourdin and they were deposited in France a few hours later. Their places in the Lysander were at once taken by Peter Churchill and Henri Frager, who were shuttled back to London to have breakfast with Buckmaster!
While all this was happening the code department was a Maquis no one wanted to supply.
The transposition keys which Tiltman had offered to produce by machine at Bletchley had finally arrived and were a great disappointment. There were long spaces between each pair of keys, which would make them difficult to photograph, and I’d found mistakes in several where numbers had been duplicated. Nor were the key lengths sufficiently varied. The six WOK-makers were doing a better job by hand.
An even greater disappointment was the non-arrival of Tiltman’s assistant, who’d be responsible for mass-producing the keys. I was anxious to get his reactions to letter one-time pads, which I regarded as my bid for legitimacy in a world full of bastards. It was now essential for my concept of substituting letters for figures to be vetted by an expert. Without Bletchley’s approval, I couldn’t proceed with it.
The system would also need Nick’s
support. I’d explained it to him a week ago and he’d promised to think it over, but I hadn’t heard from him since. I was about to break his door down when his secretary phoned me. Nick wanted to see me immediately. Tiltman’s assistant would be arriving in an hour and it was essential that we discussed the agenda.
A Lysander couldn’t have got me there more quickly.
THIRTY
The War Dance
The moment I crossed Nick’s sacrosanct threshold I knew that I’d been summoned to a conférence extraordinaire.
He and Heffer were so immersed in a letter one-time pad that its proud daddy had been obliged to knock twice to gain admittance. They were examining the fledgling code as if unable to decide whether to christen or circumcise it.
Pointing to a chair without looking up, Nicky brusquely informed me that he’d explained the system to CD and Gubbins, who were very impressed by its simplicity. However, they insisted that it mustn’t be used without Bletchley’s blessing, ‘which you mustn’t count on getting. They may have reservations about one-time pads for agents.’
I didn’t need to ask why. If the Germans copied the idea, Bletchley could no longer break the codes of their trainee agents when they transmitted practice messages which Y intercepted. (The agents used the same codes when they landed in England as they did at training school.)
‘Marks, are you listening to me? We must settle what you’re going to say to Commander Dudley-Smith.’ He pointed out that the commander couldn’t spend long with me as he had another appointment, and that he was expecting to discuss the volume of machine-made keys we’d need from Bletchley over the next few months. He then warned me that the commander was ‘exceptionally bright’, and was likely to ask me some awkward questions. On no account must I disclose the code requirements of individual country sections or allow myself to be drawn into discussing SOE’s future commitments. ‘Is that understood?’
