by Leo Marks
I promised not to use it as an ashtray, except in emergencies.
Glancing at my desk, which was fortunately devoid of de Gaulle’s secret messages, he said he was delighted to learn from Kay that I’d stopped playing silly buggers with Valois. He then demanded to be told what I had against the Free French using their own code for their political messages.
I hesitated, always a mistake with Tommy, and he looked at me sharply. ‘They send us the clear-texts so what’s all the fuss about?’
Although it was more distasteful to prevaricate with Tommy than with anyone else in Baker Street, including myself, I hastily explained that I had no idea what code the Free French were using.
‘I should bloody well hope not. A deal’s a deal.’
He softened slightly. ‘What’s worrying you? Perhaps I can help.’
I almost told him the truth, but MCs and Croix de Guerre are never won by almosts, and I was no candidate for either. I said that having to memorise two coding systems was clearly overloading the agents, because they sent so many indecipherables in their secret code.
‘They’ve not sent a single one since I’ve been back. And, now I come to think of it, I don’t remember any for the last six months.’
His ‘now I come to think of it’ worried me.
It was essential to change the subject before he put two and two together and came up with a Marks.
I was curious about his latest code name and asked how he’d come to be called the White Rabbit. ‘I work for a fucking mad hatter’s tea party,’ he said. ‘Can you think of a better reason?’
Without waiting for a reply, he pointed to a pile of WOKs on the desk. ‘I’ll be needing one of those before much longer. Why not give it to me now so I can get used to carrying it?’
He hurried off, suitably attired, to his appointment in Duke Street. I sensed an anger in him which had nothing to do with his decorations, and was worried by his impatience to return to France.
My intercom buzzed twice, a warning from Muriel that it was perilously close to Noor-time.
Even in SOE it simply wasn’t done to keep a princess waiting.
Notes
* Twenty Jakata Tales, published by George G. Harrap, 1939.
* It was almost a year before his MC was officially sanctioned.
FORTY
The Extended Briefing
The Jataka Tales contained twenty stories of Buddha’s former birth. I’d read each story twice and knew one of them by heart.
It concerned a monkey who ruled over eighty thousand other monkeys and who loved them so much that he allowed them to use his body as a bridge so that they could cross it safely to avoid being shot by wicked King Brahmadatta, who coveted their mangoes. But one of the monkeys jumped on him too heavily and broke his back, and as he lay dying, wicked King Brahmadatta stood beside him.
‘You have given your life to save your followers,’ he said. ‘Who are you, blessed one? And who are they?’
‘O King,’ replied the dying monkey, ‘I am their chief and their guide. They lived with me in this tree and I was their father and I loved them. I do not suffer in leaving this world because I have gained my subjects’ freedom. And if my death may be a lesson to you, then I am more than happy. It is not your sword which makes you a king; it is love alone.’
And Brahmadatta ruled with love over his people and they were happy ever after.
O Noor. What the hell are you doing in SOE?
I longed to be able to walk into a briefing room and switch on the detached receptivity with which an analyst treats his patients – especially those who’ve paid his fees in advance.
But as soon as I glimpsed the slender figure seated at a desk in the Orchard Court briefing room I knew that the only thing likely to be detached was one (if not both) of my eyeballs. No one had mentioned Noor’s extraordinary beauty.
I invited Her Highness to compose a message at least 250 letters long and encode it for transmission.
‘Right.’
As if she’d been waiting all her life to obey this command she wrote out a message in French, but as soon as she’d finished it she spent five minutes changing it. She then contemplated the result with the special smile of a satisfied creator. I suspected that she’d written another Jataka tale and had forgotten that she was supposed to encode it.
As gently as I could I reminded her that London was on the air and would like to receive her message.
She apologised profusely and produced her poem-code from her handbag. It was in French, and in answer to my question she said she’d written it herself. (If only other agents would copy her example, at least in this – but most of them insisted on using poems which they’d learned at school.)
She chose five words and made a note of the indicator group. She took a little time to recover from this effort and I had a feeling that she’d left the room. Returning suddenly from a better place, she glanced shyly at the nearby lecher and began numbering her key phrase as if she were a small child trying to prove that she could count to ten.
Without any warning she changed gear and completed her first transposition more rapidly than any agent I’d briefed. Apparently believing that the job was now finished, she picked up the sheet of paper on which she’d written her clear-text and became absorbed in rereading it. She even altered a word but made no attempt to correct what she’d so far encoded. Finally satisfied that it was ready for publication, she looked up at me as if wondering what came next. She was astonished when I pointed out that the encoding was only half-finished.
Apologising profusely, she dug the pencil (and me) into the paper and finished transposing the message in under ten minutes (an in-house record). Looking at the code groups as if wondering where they’d come from, she submitted her message for official approval.
I asked her to decode it herself.
Twenty minutes later she was still trying.
Disliking cruelty to children with the fervour of one who’s never been subjected to it, I picked up her worksheets and started to examine them. Princess Einar Skinnarland had indeed set a record: she’d hatted two columns, made a mistake in her indicator group, and misnumbered her transposition key.
I sat as close to her as I dared and took her through her encoding line by line. There was no response from her. I glanced up to make sure she was still there and saw that she was nearly in tears, which made two of us.
‘You’ve made fewer mistakes than most,’ I said, ‘but those you have made are very inventive.’
This seemed to please her. But I knew that a wrong note now would lose the battle of the briefing.
‘Coded messages have one thing in common with monkeys,’ I said. ‘If you jump too hard on them you’ll break their backs – and that’s what you’ve done to this one. I doubt if Brahmadatta himself could decipher it, I know my monkeys in the code room couldn’t.’
It didn’t seem possible but her eyes grew larger. ‘You’ve read my book?’
The intensity of her look reduced me to chutney. ‘Yes. And I greatly enjoyed it. It also taught me a lot.’
‘What?’
I pointed to the indicator group and took a calculated risk. ‘You’ve told me a lie, Noor – and you’ve made the code tell a lie.’
I knew I’d used a loaded word but wasn’t prepared for the loaded Noor, who sprang to her feet to confront her vilifier. ‘I’ve what?’
‘Given the wrong indicator group. What else is that but a lie?’
‘I hadn’t thought of it like that – really I hadn’t.’
I waited for her to sit down, then I made her look at each of her mistakes before totting them up like a waiter with the bill. ‘That makes a total of six lies and one half-truth. We’d have to try a hundred thousand attempts before Colonel Buckmaster could read this message – and even they mightn’t be enough.’
I could barely hear her whispered ‘Oh no’.
It was time to produce the only lifeline I could offer her: ‘I believe your Jataka Ta
les could help you to become a very good coder.’
She looked at me in astonishment. ‘How?’
‘Every time you encode a message think of the letters in it as monkeys trying to cross a bridge between Paris and London. If they fall off, they’ll be caught and shot … but they can’t cross by themselves, and if you don’t help them by guiding them slowly and methodically, one step at a time, giving them all your thoughts and all your protection, they’ll never reach the other side. When there’s a truth to pass on, don’t let your code tell lies.’
‘May I try again, please?’
She encoded a new message at half her previous speed (but still more quickly than most), and copied out the code groups carefully. But before surrendering them to me she closed her eyes and ran her fingers across them as if searching for injuries. Without being asked, she encoded another message, again running her fingers across the code groups before giving them to me. Both messages were perfect, and she knew it before I said so.
‘Thank you, thank you – but will it be all right if I think about pigs sometimes?’ (One of her stories was about two piglets named Mahatundila and Cullatindila.)
I wondered if she’d asked my permission to introduce piglets because she sensed I was Jewish. ‘You must do whatever helps you to cross that bridge – but Noor, will you be able to keep it up?’
‘Mr Marks, I promise you I will.’ It was the promise of an adult.
But her maturity was about to be tested to the full.
‘We must discuss your security checks.’
‘May I ask you something first?’
‘Of course.’
‘What do you want to do when the war is over?’
This was extending the briefing to its outer limits but Sufi Marks owed her the truth. ‘Write a play.’
‘What about?’
‘A girl who can’t laugh.’
She wanted to know why she couldn’t, what had been done to help her and what the story was – the kind of questions authors indulge in when they don’t envy one another’s royalties.
Like all shy people she mistook hesitancy for reticence. ‘Don’t you want to tell me? – or shouldn’t I have asked?’
I was afraid of disappointing her. ‘She hasn’t laughed since she was five, and she’s now eighteen. Her parents have taken her to every doctor, psychiatrist and comedian in the country but she still can’t laugh. Then one day she looks out of the window and sees a dirty old tramp and bursts out laughing. They bring him into the house and she finds him even funnier. They persuade him to stay, but the one thing he won’t stand for is being laughed at.
‘However, he’s no ordinary tramp, and he’s determined to find out what stopped her from laughing. And when he discovers what someone did to her she’s cured. And that’s when she sees him as he really is – a dirty old tramp. And he has to leave her.’
‘It’s very sad. And very funny. I suppose he leaves without letting her know how much she owes to him?’
What Sufi instinct told her that?
‘He doesn’t think she owes him anything.’
‘Does it have a title?’
It hadn’t until then. But her expression supplied it. ‘It’s called The Girl Who Couldn’t Quite!’*
‘Lots of people will come and see it, including me – if I can.’
Her ability to do so might depend on the next few minutes.
‘Security checks, Noor.’
‘I’m still wondering what stopped her from laughing. Sorry, security checks.’ She returned reluctantly to less important business.
Like all agents using the poem-code, she had a ‘bluff’ check which she was allowed to disclose to the enemy, and a ‘true’ check which was supposed to be known only to London. The only circumstance in which the checks had any value was if the agent were caught before passing any messages, as the enemy had no back traffic to refer to. With the situation in France worsening daily this could well happen to Noor.
I glanced again at her worksheet. She’d used her checks correctly but might not have realised that she had to lie about them.
‘Lie about them?’ she echoed. ‘Why should I do that?’
‘Because if you tell them what your “true” check is they’ll pretend that their messages are coming from you, and we shan’t know that you’ve been caught. That’s why you must lie to them.’
‘To stop them lying to you?’
‘Yes.’
‘But there’s a better way. Suppose that I refused to tell them anything at all – no matter how often they ask?’ It was a statement of intent.
I remembered how she’d ended her tale of the dying monkey: ‘I do not suffer in leaving this world because I have gained my subjects’ freedom. And if my death may be a lesson to you, then I am more than happy.’
She’d let her back be broken rather than tell a lie.
‘Noor, we’ve got to find a way round this …’ I struggled desperately to think of one, and the dying monkey warned me that there was very little time.
‘I’m going to give you a security check that’s completely new, and you won’t have to lie about it because no one but you and me will know that it exists.’
It had only just been born and I suspected that she sensed it.
‘All you have to do is remember one thing. Never use a key phrase with eighteen letters in it – any other number but not eighteen. If you use eighteen, I’ll know you’ve been caught.’
‘Eighteen’s my lucky number. Yes, I could do that; and I promise you not to forget it. I promise you, Mr Marks.’
But her father had a twenty-year start on me and I wasn’t taking any chances. ‘I want you to encode three messages at least two hundred letters long and have them ready for me at twelve o’clock tomorrow.’
‘Right.’
‘Include your true and bluff checks but remember—’
‘I mustn’t use a key phrase eighteen letters long.’
‘See you tomorrow then.’
She was reaching for her pencil as I left.
I prayed, or my equivalent – went without a cigar – that she’d repeat all her old mistakes, and that I could write a bad report on her to prevent her from going in.
She’d encoded six new messages, and every one of her monkeys had crossed the bridge safely, including her security checks.
I asked how she’d let me know if she were caught.
She immediately numbered a key phrase eighteen letters long and handed it to me proudly.
On 10 June I sent Buckmaster the report that he needed.
On the night of 16 June Noor boarded a Lysander and in the early hours of the 17th landed in France.
On 21 June Maurice telephoned me. He thought I’d like to know that she’d left the Loire valley and had arrived in Paris. He wasn’t sure when she’d be able to start transmitting but hoped it would be soon. Throughout the conversation he referred to her by her field name, Madeleine.
She might be known as such to F section, to her fellow agents and to the Germans. But to me she was, and would always remain, the Girl Who Couldn’t Quite.
Note
* Produced at St Martin’s Theatre in 1948. Despite its press, it ran in the West End for several months. One benevolent reviewer, C.A. Darlington, likened its climax to The Turn of the Screw. The others screwed it altogether, though a few were kind enough to suggest that the author try again. Possibly because of its suggestive title and its small cast (it had few other merits), it became an even greater success than Charley’s Aunt in repertory and amateur companies. It was then inflicted on Australia and South Africa, who in those days had done nothing to deserve it. It still lingers on, as does this meeting with Noor, some fifty years later.
FORTY-ONE
Operation Gift-Horse
In a disorganisation like SOE, where a single mistake could cost an agent’s life, all new ideas needed a cooling-off period, and Gift-Horse had been confined to its stall for over a week.
Feeling sufficiently di
stanced from it, I took it from its paddock for a health check, confident that anything so innovative that had been conceived so painlessly would end in the confidential waste. Finding no flaw in it, which was extremely disturbing, I decided to submit it to Nick and Heffer for a dispassionate briefing. The gurus would know instinct-ively whether Gift-Horse was a turning point or a non-starter, which was what made them gurus.
At first the deception scheme amused them and they called it ‘bloody sauce’. But when they realised that it was a serious attempt to confuse WOKs with poem-codes and waste the time of the enemy’s cryptog-raphers they found the sauce very much to their liking. They warned me not to overdo it, added a few kind words about its ingenuity and prepared to resume more important business.
But they weren’t rid of me yet.
I wasn’t prepared to launch Gift-Horse until I had the answer to a question which had been troubling me for months. I wanted to know what had gone wrong with Germany’s cryptographers.
Having been taught by Father (who was also my boxing instructor) never to underestimate the opposition, I was convinced that the enemy’s Tiltmans were as brilliant as their Bletchley counterparts. But if they were, why had we been allowed to blow up the Norsk Hydro, expand our secret armies and earn ourselves a mandate from the Chiefs of Staff?
It couldn’t be due to the quality of our signals. Our traffic was easy to intercept, and the poem-code even easier to break. So why were we still in business and on the point of expanding in all directions?
I sought enlightenment from Nick, and to my surprise he was delighted to provide it.
Speaking with all the authority of a Signals lifetime, he declared that our traffic hadn’t been penetrated ‘to a significant extent’ because the enemy’s cryptographers had been forced to concentrate on more important commitments. He cited as examples America’s entry into the war, the Allied invasion of North Africa (Torch), and the Russian counter-attack at Stalingrad (surely the most effective eviction notice ever served on an invader).
