by Leo Marks
‘What’s happened to your new codes which I didn’t think much of?’
I told him that the first WOKs and LOPs would be delivered in a fortnight but would have to be checked and camouflaged and couldn’t be issued until the June moon.
A small smile checked and camouflaged whatever he was thinking. ‘Don’t be impatient. June will be here all too soon, take it from me.’ His outposting was due on 1 June.
He stared down at an in tray which was as empty as his future, and I couldn’t believe what I said to him next.
‘I’m not sure they’re going to work, sir.’ It was the first time I’d admitted this to anyone, myself included.
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know, sir – I’ve a feeling I’ve missed something.’
‘Nonsense. They’ll do the job, that’s one thing I am sure of … What’s more …’ His voice trailed away like Boni’s touch on the keyboard, and a moment later he reached for the drawer where his bottles were kept.
But he wasn’t quite ready to relinquish command and pointed a shaky finger at our joint telegram. ‘You’ve marked that message “Top Priority” and it’s high time you gave it some! Despatch it at once.’
‘Right, sir.’
I wanted to thank him and wish him good luck, but he gave me a dismissive nod which might have been meant for both of us.
It was only when I’d closed the door that I realised why I’d opened it. I needed the company of another failure to make my own bearable.
SOE would never know how much it owed to a tube of French toothpaste and a Belgian labourer’s cap.
They’d arrived last night from the Thatched Barn. The toothpaste was intended to camouflage a WOK, the cap a LOP, and I was happily examining the false bottom of one and the lining of the other when I heard what was usually my favourite sound (my own voice) telling Ozanne that I was afraid the new codes weren’t going to work as I had a feeling that I’d missed something.
The feeling was now a conviction.
It had something to do with the camouflage, though I’d no idea what. To ease the growing tension and allow the cause of it to surface, I wore the Belgian cap LOPsided and gave the French toothpaste a hearty squeeze. A white blob emerged but gave no warning of the dark truth which accompanied it.
We’d paid endless attention to the camouflaging of codes but none whatever to the camouflaging of code groups. If any of our code groups stood out in isolation, wireless interception units could pinpoint them and track the movements of the operators who’d transmitted them. They could also detect the arrival of new agents and build up a picture of impending operations.
WOK code groups were exempt from this worry as they were the product of double-transposition and couldn’t be distinguished from poem-code traffic. But LOP code groups were the product of substitutions and would stand out from all our other messages because of the proportion of vowels to consonants and the shortness of the messages (as few as ten letters).
Unless we found a way to remedy this deficiency, interception units would have a field day.
I hurried into Nick and showed him the same message encoded in both a WOK and a LOP:
WOK message:
COFIH
LADEO
STESA
LERTD
NUSOT
DRNIS
LOP message:
XTZOM
YVHJR
ZDVGG
TYPHL
XVSTG
DOZTE
He took one glance at the code groups, and at once sent for Heffer.
The Guru was now MS/A (deputy director of Signals), but still saw no reason to hurry, and examined the messages like a tortoise reconnoitring a leaf. ‘Right,’ he finally said. ‘What can we do about it?’
We agreed that there was no way of making substitution code groups resemble transposition keys without a major re-encipherment process which agents couldn’t undertake. Nor could we conceal the shortness of the messages. We also agreed that LOPs were far too valuable to be abandoned.
Nick said that he’d encountered similar problems with peacetime traffic, though they had little relevance to our present dilemma. After exchanging reminiscences with Heffer, he decided that the only way to prevent the enemy from pinpointing individual messages would be to wait until large numbers of agents had been issued with LOPs so that they opened up simultaneously right across Europe.
Heffer suggested that the best time would be August, when dropping operations were likely to expand. Nick favoured November, and they compromised on September, subject to what might happen in the meantime.
Nick then congratulated me on spotting the problem in time, and I hurried from the office before I exploded.
I should have spotted it from the outset. But so should Nick and Heffer! And what about Tiltman and Dudley-Smith, the experts from Bletchley? Did they neglect to mention it because it was so elementary that they felt they didn’t need to?
What else was so obvious that the head of agents’ codes had completely overlooked it?
After wasting an hour brooding about Holland and the dangers of Dutch agents using Belgian escape lines, I heard the sound of my favourite footsteps.
I hadn’t seen Tommy since he’d called in to claim the cigar which made his return from France official. That was over a fortnight ago and I’d missed being part of his dawn patrol.
However, I’d kept track of his progress and knew that he’d been sent for by his idol de Gaulle, who’d thanked him for all that he was doing for France and asked for his impressions of the French will to resist.
I hoped that he hadn’t come to evaluate mine.
He sat opposite me, which made the office complete, studied my face instead of the contents of my desk and asked if he were interrupting.
‘No more than usual.’
He accepted a new cigar and continued to watch me in silence as he lit it. ‘Now then,’ he said. ‘Bring me up to date.’
I produced a silk for his inspection, and he examined it as if he were wearing gloves. Pronouncing it excellent, he reminded me that the first time he’d seen a WOK it was still an idea on paper.
I was about to say that without his encouragement it probably still would be when he caught sight of a LOP. ‘That looks interesting. Are you allowed to tell me what it is?’
‘No,’ I said, and proceeded to show him how it worked.
He listened in silence, then asked if he could try it for himself. He wrote a message in French fifty letters long ‘to give it a proper test’, and I watched him become the first agent to encode a message in a LOP.
It was a ponderous performance as he double-checked each letter he enciphered. ‘This is bloody slow going,’ he complained. But halfway through the message he began to find his rhythm, and he finished the last twenty-five letters more quickly than I could.
‘What do you call this code?’
‘A LOP!’
‘Short for “Leo’s an old pisspot”?’
‘Letter one-time pad.’
‘Available to Duke Street?’
‘If they’ll accept it.’
‘Why the hell shouldn’t they? – I’ll help you all I can … Remind me about the checks.’
I took him through them again, though I knew he understood them and was simply making sure that he’d done his correctly.
‘Do we have to make a choice between WOKs and LOPs?’
I said that I hoped that LOPs would become the main code, with WOKs in reserve and poems in emergencies.
‘There’ll be plenty of those … but I can promise you this. These codes are going to make a lot of difference to a hell of a lot of agents and I hope to be one of them. I’ll use both of them next time I go in. Agreed?’
‘Yes, Tommy.’
I hoped that if he had to go in again, it wouldn’t be before September.
He glanced at his watch as if it were September already, then rose abruptly, and I wished him goodnight.
He didn’t
reply till he reached the door. He then turned back and spoke very quietly. ‘Next time, perhaps you’d care to tell me what’s worrying you – something bloody well is, and it’s about time it stopped.’
‘Old pisspot’ spent the rest of the night wondering how he knew.
THIRTY-EIGHT
The Secret Weapon
Country sections approved of poem-codes because they couldn’t be detected if agents were searched. The fact that they could be tortured out of them and were easy to break were secondary considerations. If they opposed the introduction of silks and we had to ask Gubbins to overrule them (as he’d assured Nick he would), we’d get their reluctant co-operation but forfeit their goodwill.
Knowing this, on 2 June Nick took the unprecedented step of sending a memo to all country-section heads requesting them to see me in the presence of their respective signals officers, so that I could explain on MS/A’s behalf why a radically new system of agents’ traffic would shortly be introduced. We agreed that there was no point in mentioning LOPs: if WOKs didn’t convince them of the value of tangible codes, nothing would.
On 3 June I embarked on the sales campaign, knowing that Frank Doel would make a far better job of it.
Maurice Buckmaster was the first country-section head to be shown a WOK. Normally responsive to everything which would enhance the welfare of his agents, he was facing the collapse of his two principal circuits, and suggesting new codes to him was like taking a drowning man’s hand and offering to manicure it.
He gave a cursory glance at the WOK which I put in front of him, muttered that he didn’t want his agents to carry another damn thing and left the rest to Captain Noble, his signals officer.
He couldn’t have submitted the code to a better-qualified judge. Noble (real name George Bégué) was a self-effacing Frenchman with the added distinction of being the first SOE agent to parachute into the field. He’d been dropped blind into France in May ’41, taking with him a rudimentary wireless set and a poem-code. He transmitted more than forty vital messages but had such contempt for his security checks that he’d ignored them altogether and relied on prearranged questions and answers. He’d been arrested by the Vichy police in October ’41, and F section didn’t expect to hear from him again. But in July ’42 he’d escaped from a Vichy-run prison in the heart of the Dordogne, taking nine of his fellow agents with him. He made his way to Lyons, crossed the frontier into Spain and was taken on to Buckmaster’s HQ staff as soon as he returned to London.
He’d be a major asset to the Signals directorate as a briefing officer. But at this moment he could also be an insuperable obstacle.
I explained the advantages of silk codes to him but didn’t mention their security checks. I wanted to see if he’d refer to them himself, and with a cynical little smile he eventually did.
Although he grasped the principle at once, I gave him a detailed exposition in case Maurice was tuning in. Noble waited impatiently till I’d finished, then copied out a pair of WOK keys, rapidly encoded a message and changed the indicator by secret numbers known only to him. As if to prove Nick’s maxim, ‘Once an agent always an agent,’ he checked his handiwork carefully while his fingers drummed out the code groups in Morse. Satisfied that he hadn’t forgotten how to doubletranspose, he produced a razor blade and without asking permission (which I’d gladly have given) cut the keys off the silk and watched them smoulder. I knew just how they felt.
He then turned to Buckmaster, who was somewhere in France. ‘If I’d been given such a silk to take in,’ he said, ‘I’d have troubled to use my security checks.’
Maurice reluctantly conceded that WOKs might be suitable for WT operators because they could hide them with their sets, but he was damned if he’d force organisers to carry codes as they moved around France, no matter how well the bloody things were camouflaged. He glared at me with his ‘My decision is final’ expression.
Noble was silent when I needed him most.
I confided to Maurice that WOKs were in very short supply and that it was most unlikely that we’d be able to spare them for all his organisers, as the Free French demands were likely to be heavy.
At this point I had my first order.
An outraged Maurice accused me of not realising how important his organisers were, and he absolutely insisted that all F-section agents were given silk codes or I’d damn soon hear from him. And so would Nicholls.
And if the WOKs weren’t forthcoming he’d go straight to Gubbins.
Noble winked at me as I left.
My next potential client was Colonel Hutchison.
I could hardly tell the head of RF section that I was ten minutes late for our appointment because I’d stopped off en route to break an indecipherable in de Gaulle’s secret code and sent it round to Duke Street properly enciphered.
The autocratic colonel glanced at his watch as soon as I entered his office, and I apologised for the unavoidable delay. His signals officer (tiny Kay Moore) was perched beside him, notebook at the ready.
I noticed that he had Nick’s memo in front of him with several words underlined.
He announced that although French was the only language permitted on the premises, he’d make an exception in my case. I made an exception in his by giving him a simplistic WOK briefing, and he commented on the quality of the soie.
He then said that although he was expecting ‘radical changes’ he hadn’t anticipated such a complete volte-face, and was by no means convinced it was for the better. He then insisted on encoding a message himself.
It took him five minutes to decide on a suitable text, another five to copy out his transposition keys, and five more to remember what to do with them.
Kay and I studied each other in silence. I was surprised that she could bear to look at me. It was largely my fault that she had the most unrewarding job in the whole of SOE.
It was her responsibility to liaise between me and an enemy I’d made at Duke Street named Lieutenant Valois, who was in charge of all Free French radio and signals planning. She also had to act as our interpreter (his English was on a par with my French) and we both knew that she edited our exchanges.
The main cause of our dissension was the prefixes he needed for de Gaulle’s secret code. In order to show each other when they were using this abomination, Duke Street and its agents added special prefixes to their messages, and it was up to me to provide them. At present I owed Valois twenty, every one of them a potential L-tablet.
I’d repeatedly told him that these prefixes made it easy for the Germans to identify the secret French code and, though I had no idea what sort of code it was, it would be safer if the agents stopped using it as it was overloading their traffic.
He angrily reminded me that SOE had agreed to the use of this code, that the Free French had no intention of abandoning it and that he was in no position to meddle with high-level policy. He suggested that I might care to raise the matter with General de Gaulle.
‘Who?’ I’d said.
At which point Kay had remembered another appointment.
I returned sharply to 3 June, when Hutchison announced that he’d finished his message and allowed me the privilege of inspecting it.
He’d hatted three columns and omitted five code groups, but I congratulated him on his excellent coding.
‘It’s simple enough’, he said, ‘and has a number of advantages, but the problem is Duke Street …’ He explained that the Free French were being more than usually obstructive over a number of issues, and might not agree to the poem-code being scrapped.
I pointed out that it was our responsibility to provide them with safe codes, and that Duke Street’s autonomy applied only to de Gaulle’s secret code, whatever that might be.
‘That’s all very well,’ he said, ‘but they mightn’t see it that way. I’ll have to think the whole thing over.’
I urged him not to take too long as I’d just come from a meeting with F section, whose requirements could exhaust our limited supplies.<
br />
However, he was too experienced an in-fighter to respond with order number two and said he’d deal with the question of priorities if and when it arose. He then asked for Kay’s opinion of silks.
The canny little lady made the most of her opportunity. Smiling sweetly, she said she thought they were an enormous improvement and that Duke Street was far likelier to agree to them if Leo would send Valois the list of prefixes he was waiting for.
He looked at her in astonishment. ‘What list? What prefixes? First I’ve heard of this.’
They then had a rapid exchange in French, and the only word I recognised was Leo.
The look which the colonel shot at me needed no translation. ‘It’s your job to provide prefixes as soon as Valois asks for them. Why haven’t you?’
I explained that it was due to an oversight for which I accepted full responsibility.
‘Then remedy it at once.’
I agreed that I would.
‘When? Be precise.’
I told him that I was on my way to some appointments which were almost as important as this one and would attend to the list by the end of the day.
‘I want them on my desk first thing tomorrow and I’ll send them to Duke Street with a covering note.’
I realised that he wanted the kudos of breaking the deadlock.
‘Do I have your word that they’ll be here?’
Sensing that a deal was in the offing, I promised that my secretary would deliver them to him personally.
‘In that case you can count on my full support. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Mais oui, mon colonel – absolument – je vous remercie mille fois.’
Kay didn’t translate it.
Two down, and four to go.
Although the Norwegian, Danish and Belgian sections were having as hard a time as the French, they gave me an easy one. Their questions were pertinent, their estimates sensible and they hoped the system would be working by August.
