by Leo Marks
April’s biggest shock (if not the war’s) came on 24 April, and although I’d been taught by Father that anyone who complained that the bottom had dropped out of his world was an arsehole, I joined that distinguished company.
I was informed by the supervisor at 53b that Cucumber had transmitted an indecipherable from Kale and that all routine attempts to break it had failed. The code groups were being teleprinted to London.
I immediately contacted the signalmaster, who assured me that atmospheric conditions had been excellent, that Cucumber’s operating had been flawless and that there was no question of Morse mutilation.
This negated every theory I had about the Germans double-checking Dutch agents’ coding.
Lacking the self-confidence to give up a conviction, I decided that only two inferences could be drawn from this unique indecipherable. Either Kale had made a mistake in his coding, which meant that he was free. Or Giskes had produced another masterstroke!
Perhaps he had broken my deliberate indecipherable and was repaying me in kind.
I prayed in Hebrew and in Latin that this wasn’t the case because God only knew what he’d think up next.
I was still praying when Muriel put the code groups in front of me.
Note
* ‘Innocent letters’ were usually sent to neutral territories for onward transmission to SOE. The only innocent thing about them was the code they used, which was a form of Playfair at its most vulnerable.
THIRTY-SIX
Desperate Measures
Despite Nick’s perceptive advice to ‘treat Kale’s indecipherable like any other’ I was unable to respond to it with the necessary detachment. But after wasting ten minutes searching for new approaches, I realised that speculation about Giskes would hold up the breaking and that I must proceed on the assumption that Kale was free.
The most important question was whether he’d encoded the message himself or allowed his WT operator (Cucumber) to do it for him. It was a hard one to resolve because, despite strict orders to the contrary, organisers often handed their codes to their WT operators and asked them to encode their messages for them; Kale might not regard this as much of an infringement, as he was using one of Cucumber’s poems.
I referred to the notes I’d made on their respective briefings.
Kale’s had taken place on 18 September ’42 and he’d been dropped into Holland on the 24th (my birthday, since no essential information should be withheld). Cucumber’s had taken place on 25 October and he’d been dropped on the 27th. Both had an excellent grasp of doubletransposition, but agents tended to put on special performances at their final briefings, if only to get rid of me, and it was essential to see what kind of mistakes they’d made at their training schools.
Muriel produced their training files without having to be asked.
Kale had encoded four indecipherables in fifteen messages, all due to misnumbered key phrases. Cucumber had encoded twelve indecipherables in thirty messages – six due to ‘hatted’ columns, five to misnumbered key phrases and one to a misspelt word in his poem. If Kale had done his own encoding, we’d concentrate on misnumbered key phrases. If Cucumber had done it for him, we’d have to broaden the attack.
I decided that commanders of secret armies were occasionally known to set good examples and that Kale had encoded the message himself.
Fifteen hundred attempts later there was no sign of a misnumbered key phrase. I instructed the girls to try another thousand and tackled a hundred myself. None of them succeeded, and the message’s three hundred letters began to feel like three thousand.
Staring at the code groups, I suddenly realised that there was an important factor which I’d completely overlooked.
This was only the second time that Kale had used Cucumber’s poem and its unfamiliarity might have caused him to misspell a word. The poem was in Dutch, and I’d need someone to advise me on common misspellings.
I tried to contact Bingham and Killick but was told that they were on their way to a training school and left a message for them to ring me as soon as they could.
I then enquired if there was anyone in the Signals directorate who had even a smattering of the language.
A coder admitted that she’d spent a week in Amsterdam and knew the Dutch for ‘kiss my arse’, and a signalmaster had been able to order a Dutch cap in The Hague, but that was the limit of their fluency.
I was wondering whether to contact the Dutch government-in-exile when rescue arrived from a source far closer to home.
The menaces who shared the office with me (Charlotte Denman and Molly Brewis) knew that I was in dire straits and hadn’t once interrupted me. Then, without any warning, Molly Menace cleared her throat and blushed like a schoolgirl admitting her first crush. ‘I know a word or two of Dutch,’ she said.
The three of us occasionally surprised each other (a major asset to involuntary intimacy), and I thanked her for the best news of the day. I waited until the great frame was seated beside me and explained that agents not only misspelled the words of their poems but frequently replaced them with similar-sounding words (‘piece’ for ‘peace’, ‘mite’ for ‘might’, ‘soul’ for ‘sole’). Hoping to promote some rivalry, I added that Vera Atkins of F section excelled at suggesting similar-sounding words and had helped us with many a French indecipherable (some of them Duke Street’s, though I hadn’t admitted it).
‘Oh God,’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m awful at guessing games.’ And then proceeded to prove it.
Her first dozen guesses produced gibberish, and she tried a dozen more, watching anxiously while I tested them.
To make her feel part of the operation, I explained that the charts I was using showed how the first line of the message would be read if her guesses were correct. But unfortunately none of them were.
By now she was beginning to enjoy it and made another twenty suggestions. Twenty more fiascos.
Unaccustomed to being a silent spectator, Mrs Denman announced that she’d like to ask a question.
‘Please do,’ I said, hoping she wanted to know when Molly could return to her desk.
‘Do you still think that the message was either encoded by a German or checked by one before it was transmitted?’ It was my first intimation that Nick had told her of my suspicions.
‘Yes – what of it?’ was my courteous response.
‘Then shouldn’t you be trying to misspell the poem as a German might instead of a Dutchman?’
The idea hadn’t even occurred to me.
‘Will you marry me, Charlotte? – and we’ll adopt Molly?’
A team by now, we held a brief conference and agreed that the obvious solution was to consult X section (the German directorate), though there was so much secrecy about anything to do with the Dutch that we mightn’t be allowed to approach them.
Charlotte suggested that by the time we got official permission we could have learned the language ourselves.
Blushing again, Molly admitted that she spoke a word or two of German.
Our adopted daughter then went into action.
Her first dozen suggestions produced nothing but Kauderwelsch, which according to her was the German for gibberish.
Her next dozen produced more of the same but, encouraged by Charlotte, she kauderwelsched on.
I’d decided by now that it would be quicker if I tried to anagram the message out using Kale’s first message for probable content. I was wondering how to break the news without hurting everyone’s feelings when they came to the next word of the poem: Prijs.
‘I suppose it would be Preis in German,’ said Molly, without much conviction.
‘No doubt of it,’ said Charlotte, ‘no doubt at all.’
Having no faith in it whatsoever, I substituted Preis for Prijs and numbered the transposition key accordingly, making two mistakes in the process.
‘Can’t Molly help?’ enquired Charlotte. ‘She’s good at maths too.’
Glad that one of us was, I numbered the phras
e correctly and then applied the charts, warning them that there was very little chance of clear-text emerging.
The letters utr appeared, followed by echt …
‘Utrecht,’ yelled the ladies in case I missed it.
Ten minutes later Kale’s second report on the secret army was ready for distribution. Nick, N section and Gubbins were notified, and I told the coders at 53b that their colleagues in London had broken it to make them feel less excluded.
Bingham telephoned and instructed me to read the message to him over the scrambler. He rang off without comment the moment I’d finished.
‘Some people’, said Charlotte, ‘know the Preis of everything and the value of nothing.’
An hour later I learned that I was one of them.
Nick called in to offer his congratulations and I asked if Charlotte and Molly could be transferred to the code department.
The three of them then had a personal conversation which they made no attempt to conduct in undertones – an event without precedent. It concerned two of their friends who’d been married for fifty years without being separated for more than a day. The wife had died recently, and although her husband had nothing physically wrong with him, he took to his bed and willed himself to follow her. Two days ago he had succeeded, and tomorrow they were to be buried side by side.
I wondered how it must feel to be buried next to one’s other half for ever, bombs and property-developers permitting:
It will feel strange
Not to nudge you
Or to talk to you
Or keep you warm
When you’re lying there
Only a few feet away
Or perhaps even less
But we shall get used to it in time
Of which we’ll have plenty.
We always treasured silences
In which we said everything
We shall continue to treasure them
And to say everything
Throughout the longest silence of all.
It had no place in the ditty-box but I’d found that occasional dollops of sentiment cleared my head for facts, and there were three which I had to live with:
1 I was never going to convince SOE of the extent of Giskes’s penetration.
2 I was too close to the corpse of Kale’s indecipherable to conduct a proper autopsy.
3 My talent as a cryptographer was the longest silence of all.
Thirty-Seven
Punitive Expedition
It was rare for anyone outside the Signals directorate to show the slightest interest in how indecipherables were broken, but when I least welcomed it Gubbins and Bingham displayed too much.
The general required a full report on the significance (if any) of Prijs/Preis, and Bingham wanted to know if we’d made the mistake ourselves.
After a cooling-off period of one morning (a millennium by SOE’s standards) I returned to Prijs/Preis, and rapidly decided that Giskes hadn’t sent London a deliberate indecipherable. If he’d wanted to return the compliment, he’d have taken at least as much trouble as I had, and wouldn’t have used a Germanicised misspelling. But this still didn’t mean that Kale wasn’t caught.
It was unlikely that Giskes would undertake the manual labour of double-transposition in addition to his own creative writing, and a negligent subordinate might have encoded the message, or failed to check Kale’s encoding if he’d been permitted to do it himself. Perhaps the Germans had their off moments too.
I said as much in my report to Nick, emphasising that ‘the hitherto perfect encoding of all Dutch agents despite the circumstances in which they operated’ must surely lead to only one conclusion: that most of them had been caught on landing, or shortly afterwards.
I was instructed by return to keep a ‘special watch’ on Kale’s future traffic.
His next batch of messages were perfectly encoded, and on 29 April he sent his final secret-army report. He ended by stressing that if the battle to liberate Holland didn’t take place soon even his most resolute supporters would be influenced by German propaganda (vintage Giskes?).
The traffic of Ebenezer, Heck, Hockey and Co. was equally disturbing, as they’d never been more active in the Allied cause. Between the lot of them, they were going to evacuate Broadbean to Paris, locate the headquarters of the 65th Marine Infantry Division and verify a report that the Germans were preparing to re-inundate the old Dutch water defences in case of invasion.
I wondered how much longer Giskes could keep it up.
At the beginning of May the Executive Council made an announcement which was so long overdue that all but agnostics had given up praying for it. The symbols list proclaimed that Colonel F. W. Nicholls had replaced Colonel G. D. Ozanne as director of Signals.
Heffer, who’d been lobbying for months to bring this about, confided that Ozanne had been sent on leave prior to being outposted on 1 June and had been allowed a few hours’ grace in which to clear out his belongings. SOE had no use for empty bottles.
I congratulated the Guru on his part in our liberation, and asked the key question: Was Nick now in a position to insist on showing the Dutch traffic to Tiltman?
Edging towards the door, he reminded me that Nick had been MS (director of Signals) for less than half an hour and that I mustn’t expect miracles. He then quietly informed me that Nick was now in the running to become a member of the Executive Council and that it would be a great help to all of us if he were elected.
He escaped without answering my question about Tiltman.
En route to the Signals Office for a punitive purpose, I spotted the deposed Ozanne waddling down the corridor. He stopped outside his office as if he wondered whether to knock, then disappeared inside, perhaps for the last time.
A few seconds later I found myself knocking on his door.
His Gubbins-like ‘Come’ was now a fledgling FANY’s quaver. He was as astonished to see me as I was to be there.
I knew I daren’t smile in case he thought I’d come to gloat.
‘What the devil do you want?’
As I tried to work it out, the drowning man’s life flashed before me.
He’d been appointed MS in February ’42 and immediately imposed C’s concept of clandestine communications on SOE. Despite the protests of his subordinates his confidence in C’s judgement remained purblind, and by the time Nick arrived to take control of agents’ traffic he’d successfully crushed all efforts to scrap the poem-code and replace it with WOKs. He’d also supported all the other signals deathtraps recommended by C. A professional signals officer, he’d suffered the ultimate ignominy of being found inadequate by amateurs, but at least his convictions were genuine, unlike those of some senior figures in SOE.
‘I need a bit of advice, sir.’
He clearly thought he’d misheard me. ‘You need a bit of what?’
I was tempted to say ‘nookie’ but, true though this was, it was hardly likely to concern him. ‘A bit of advice, sir.’
He examined me from head to toe (a regrettably short distance) as a silent reminder that I’d thwarted his efforts to make a second lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Signals. ‘If you’ve got a problem, take it to Colonel Nicholls or Captain Heffer – it’s what they’re here for.’
I explained that they were on their way to Station 53b and that I didn’t think it could wait.
He eyed me suspiciously as I struggled to think of a problem to present to him. ‘What is it then?’ he finally asked. ‘I haven’t much time.’
I remembered that I was clutching a telegram which I’d been on my way to despatch when I’d spotted him in the corridor. It was addressed to the coders of Massingham, who’d received an indecipherable from an agent in Italy which they’d made no attempt to break, though it had been in the code room for almost a week. My reprimand included the motto, ‘There shall be no such thing as an indecipherable message,’ and contained a number of other pertinent comments. ‘It’s about this message I want to send Massingham, si
r.’ I informed him of the girls’ dereliction and that I wanted to send them a suitably worded reprimand.
‘What the devil’s that to do with me?’
I explained that the first thing I wanted him to do was initial the telegram so that it could be sent out at once.
He reminded me sharply that ever since I’d been appointed head of agents’ codes I’d been allowed to originate main-line telegrams, and he wasn’t aware that my authority had been rescinded, though he suspected that it should have been.
‘I have the authority, sir, but I was hoping for your comments on the message itself. I’m not sure if it’s strong enough.’
He examined the telegram as if it too were wearing civilian clothing which had been manufactured by a Jewish tailor who was far from bespoke. A sound escaped him which might have been a belch, or an even less sociable intestinal call-sign. ‘I don’t know what you’re up to, Marks! But if you really want my opinion of this …’
I assured him that I did, and found that I meant it.
He gave me a brief lecture on the art of reprimanding subordinates, his chins waddling as he warmed to his particular sphere of expertise. He then said that in his opinion the motto was the only reminder the girls needed, that the phrase ‘get off your arses’ was not in SOE’s code book, though he often felt it should be, and that the best of us can make mistakes.
He ended by running his pencil through everything which he con-sidered redundant and contemplated the result with an editor’s satisfaction. It had lost twenty words and was all the better for it.
I thanked him for improving the message and repeated my request for him to initial it.
‘Why do you need me to if you’ve got the authority?’
‘So that I can blame it on you if it backfires, sir.’
He chuckled as he initialled his last telegram, and his next question took me completely by surprise.
