by Leo Marks
But there were other reasons why we’d been allowed to get away with the ‘cock-up of a code’ we’d inherited from C.
According to ‘a reliable source’ (Tiltman himself?), for the past eighteen months German cryptographers had been unable to function at their best because of high-level interference of a kind which Bletchley ‘simply wouldn’t tolerate’. Although stretched to their limits by military, diplomatic and intelligence intercepts, they were under orders from Hitler to break the traffic of his Japanese and Italian allies, and knew that hell hath no fury like a Führer kept waiting. They also had to humour Goering, Goebbels and Himmler, whose relationships were comparable to ours with C and who insisted on reading each other’s messages. As a result of these and other pressures, SOE’s traffic had been given little or no priority, and was usually attacked at local level by groups of German sergeants with a flair for cryptography.
However, our involvement with D-Day put us in an altogether different category. He was absolutely certain that SOE’s traffic would soon be upgraded, and if Gift-Horse could make it more trouble than it was worth and waste their ‘bloody time’, it might even help the war effort generally, and I must push ahead with it. ‘Your attitude’s right!’
‘More power to its hoof,’ added Heffer.
I almost neighed with relief.
Then the responsibility hit me.
In the absence of any advice about Gift-Horse except ‘Don’t overdo it,’ I reviewed the entire concept as if C had suggested it. That way I knew I’d be taking no chances.
The success of Gift-Horse depended on a fact of cipher life on which I’d stake my own as I’d learned it from Tiltman. Even his experienced eye couldn’t tell whether a message had been encoded in a WOK or a poem-code, as both were the product of double-transposition.
Every WOK message began with a five-letter group to show which pair of worked-out keys had been used. Every poem-code message began with a five-letter indicator group to show which five words of the poem had been used. These indicator groups were the quickest way of ending a poem-code’s life if the agents used the same ones for different messages. And if the messages were of equal length (as they frequently were) a novice could break them in a matter of hours. I’d done so myself at Bedford. (And once broken, the five words of the poem could be reconstructed, and if they were part of a famous quotation, the rest of the traffic would be read automatically.)
But WOK traffic offered no such facilities. Every key was made by hand, and no two were the same.
The ETs (enemy’s Tiltmans) couldn’t tell which system was in use, and it was up to us to point them in the wrong direction. To achieve this, we would sprinkle WOK traffic with repeated indicator groups, as if the agent were using a poem-code and had chosen the same five words of his poem for different messages, though the keys were completely unrelated.
This apparent duplication would stimulate the ETs’ cryptographic taste buds for a meal which wasn’t on the menu. And if by some lucky chance these repeated indicators were used on messages of identical length, the temptation to take appropriate action would be as hard to resist as a lady casually declaring that she’d forgotten to put on her knickers (an experience with which I was familiar only from hearsay).
I collected twenty sets of WOK keys from the counter-shufflers, took them to my office and inserted two hundred duplicated indicators.
Three hours later they were on their way to the printers and would soon be ready to lie with silken tongues.
It was a puny enough attempt to take the code war to the enemy, and I might never know if it achieved its objective, but it had one compensation: lacking the courage to take the slightest risk unless it were strictly mental, I imagined myself mounted on a charger leading my code groups to the heart of Berlin.
If ever I had to write the history of agents’ ciphers, I resolved that Gift-Horse would have a chapter to itself.
FORTY-TWO
A Terrible Gaffe
By the end of June six WOKs had opened up in France, two in Norway, and eighteen others (seven of them Gift-Horsed) had been issued to agents waiting to be dropped.
But the elation was negated by the worst breach of security any country section had yet committed.
It concerned Archambault (real name Gilbert Norman), who’d been dropped into France by F section in November ’42 to transmit and receive traffic for the Prosper circuit and to act as deputy to Prosper himself. The twenty-seven-year-old Englishman hadn’t made a single mistake at his final code briefing (not always a good sign), but turned out to be one of those rare agents who encoded even better in the field than they did in practice, sending only three indecipherables in eight months’ traffic and inserting his true and bluff checks in every message.
But on 27 June he sent a message with his true check omitted. I told Buckmaster that I was examining all Archambault’s messages to make certain that he hadn’t done this before and was checking the original decodings in case any of the girls had made a mistake.
Giving me no hint of his intentions, Maurice immediately informed Archambault that he’d forgotten to insert his true check in his last message and accused him of committing ‘a serious breach of security which must not, repeat must not be allowed to happen again!’
Nor must blunders of this magnitude, though we’d done our damnedest, repeat our damnedest, to prevent them.
While Nick was still a new boy I’d shown him six messages about signals which country sections had sent to agents without consulting any of us (including N section’s to Trumpet concerning missing security checks).
He’d immediately issued a directive to all country-section heads (copy to Gubbins) instructing them not to refer to codes, signal plans or any matters relating to WT security without first consulting him or a member of his directorate. He’d then ordered me to bring any future lapses to his immediate attention so that he could report the culprits to Gubbins.
Reluctant to subject anyone I liked to the ultimate deterrent, I said nothing to Nick and spoke to Maurice myself.
He accepted full responsibility for a ‘terrible gaffe’ and assured me it wouldn’t happen again. He then asked if I thought Archambault had been caught.
I promised him my answer within an hour.
Archambault’s back traffic confirmed that he’d always used his true check, and that he hadn’t made a single mistake in his coding (his three indecipherables were due to Morse mutilation), but I needed a little longer with his traffic because several things puzzled me.
Assuming he was in enemy hands (he’d convinced me that he was), why had they allowed him to leave out his true check? Was it because they didn’t want him to be late for his sked but hadn’t had time to read his back traffic and work out what his checks really were? Or was it because they might have had difficulty in identifying his messages, as he’d used four different prefixes, and they hadn’t had time to collate them?
Neither explanation satisfied me, as it reflected on their efficiency, for which I still had the utmost respect, but this didn’t change my conviction that Archambault was in their hands.
It was the first time that I’d been able to reach a definitive conclusion from a poem-code’s security checks, and I called at Maurice’s office in case he had any questions.
Still contrite from his gaffe, he said he’d reached the same conclusion, but intended to continue sending messages to Archambault in the hope of prolonging his life.
He was brilliant at doing this (he’d had plenty of practice), and I left him to get on with it.
Thinking about captured agents had become a June preoccupation. RF section had lost one of its giants a fortnight ago and the shock had yet to wear off (for some it never would). His name was Jean Moulin, and I’d heard so much about him from Tommy that I felt as if we’d met.
I had in fact caught a glimpse of the great Moulin when I’d called at Duke Street a few months ago to deliver overdue prefixes for the accursed French code. He’d been picked up by
Lysander the previous night and was striding side by side with Tommy towards Passy’s office.
At first glance (there wasn’t to be a second) the two agents could have been mistaken for brothers (which in all essential respects they were). Both in their early forties, they had the same chunky build, the same purposeful stride, the same aura of limitless chutzpah.
The main difference was that Moulin was already a legend. In an organisation like ours reputations like his were hard to acquire, and recalling a few of his achievements was as close as I could get to a memorial service.
In 1940, the Vichy government dismissed him from his post for being anti-German and he became a freelance partisan, forming three separate resistance groups in Vichy-controlled France.
Having achieved more without SOE’s help than most freedom fighters with it, he decided that his only chance of getting arms, supplies and working capital would be to join forces with one of London’s big battalions, and he escaped to England via Lisbon in 1941 to make a first-hand assessment of the relative merits of SOE and Duke Street.
His arrival in London was the start of a Dutch auction (without Giskes, thank God) between de Gaulle and Buckmaster, who interviewed him personally, each determined to recruit him on the spot. But in reality it was Moulin who interviewed them, and he kept them in suspense for several weeks before announcing his decision (he was an experienced politician). To Duke Street’s delight he finally opted to join de Gaulle, who at once appointed him his personal representative in France (it takes a natural leader to know one). He was also appointed delegate general to the Free French Committee, and at Tommy’s suggestion was code-named Rex in London and Max in the field.
Armed with excellent credentials but very little else, Rex/Max was dropped blind into France on 1 January ’42 and landed in a ditch. He then faced the even greater quagmire of persuading the leaders of mutually antagonistic resistance groups to unite under de Gaulle, and three weeks later reported to Duke Street that he’d had a 100 per cent success rate and was hoping to improve it.
In February he was joined by Passy, Brossolette and Tommy (the Arquebus mission) and numerous policy differences emerged which had not been apparent in Duke Street. Putting unity above all, he formed the MUR (Mouvement Uni de la Résistance), and continued welding his compatriots into the nucleus of a secret army until his arrest near Lyons on 20 June. (On the day Buckmaster heard of Moulin’s capture he commiserated with his rival Jim Hutchison on the loss of ‘one of the most valuable agents in the whole of France’.)
But memories of giants seldom came sequentially, and I also knew that in 1940 he’d been severely tortured by the Germans for refusing to sign a document which falsely accused the French of committing atrocities. When they finally released him, he tried to commit suicide for fear that he’d weaken if they tortured him again, and as a result of his self-inflicted injuries he was left with a badly scarred throat and husky voice and rarely appeared in public without a scarf or muffler (he was wearing both when I glimpsed him in Duke Street).
Now he was in their hands again.
I was wondering whether his capture would give Tommy yet another reason for returning to France, when he put his head round the door and asked if he were disturbing me.
‘No more than usual.’
He advanced towards me while I pressed the buzzer for sandwiches and coffee, which Muriel produced within seconds.
He congratulated her on running a first-class hotel, despite its proprietor, then slumped into a chair and announced that the personnel department was an absolute disgrace. ‘There’s not a person in it who can tell his pass from his elbow.’
He spent the next few minutes suggesting imaginative remedies but didn’t tell me what they’d done to upset him, and I knew that he was venting his distress at the loss of Moulin. (To call it distress was as great an understatement as describing Moulin as a dedicated patriot or a hanged man as being out of breath.)
Speaking in a voice as husky as Rex/Max’s, he said that Moulin wouldn’t break no matter what they did to him, and was certain to be executed before much longer.* He then contrasted Moulin’s achievements as a recruiting officer in occupied France with the personnel department’s disastrous attempts to staff preoccupied Baker Street. ‘I can find only one thing in the bastards’ favour. They give jobs to large numbers of people who’d do even more damage elsewhere.’
He suddenly switched his attack to the Signals directorate – ‘And you people let the bastards get away with it.’ He cited as examples two
I didn’t tell him that the Signals directorate was responsible for its own recruitment, and we’d picked the two horrors ourselves. (I’d already taken steps to have them transferred, hopefully to C, from whence they probably came.)
He left shortly afterwards without realising (though one could never be sure with him) that he’d touched on a problem which was causing the Signals directorate even more trouble than C and the Germans: the problem of keeping pace with SOE’s expansion.
Agents’ traffic, which had doubled since the Chiefs of Staff’s mandate, was expected to reach a million groups a week in the run-up to D-Day, and SOE took it for granted that we’d have the resources to deal with it. SOE also took it for granted that we could continue to send fully trained coders, WT operators and briefing officers to Massingham, Cairo and the Far East. No matter how often we protested that we were so short-staffed ourselves that we were in difficulties with the daily traffic, we were expected to maintain the standards SOE hadn’t wanted in the first place.
By the end of June the Signals directorate was the largest in SOE, and the code department the largest in the Signals directorate, and I was under orders from Nick to ensure that every branch had an adequate intake of new ‘bodies’.
I relied on the FANYs for coders, on the personnel department for WOK-makers and on God for briefing officers. Anxious not to overload the Almighty (his blessing on LOPs was urgently required), I also relied on both the FANYs and the personnel department for briefing officers, whom I collected as if they were rare first editions. (The ones I most coveted had to be in mint mental condition, preferably with their bindings intact.)
But other organisations were also scouring the market for incipient code-mindedness. Bletchley and C were constantly headhunting, had top priority and were expert scavengers. We were also up against the Foreign Office and the signals units of the armed forces.
Since competing with the opposition by orthodox means was getting us nowhere, I contacted two of SOE’s most formidable ladies, Miss Furze and Captain Henderson, to discuss alternative measures. Miss Furze’s function was to recruit female civilians for the whole of Baker Street, Captain Henderson’s to supply the Signals directorate’s FANYs. Although I was aware that both empresses preferred to be visited, I invited them to meet me in my office, and was amazed when they accepted.
My first step was to show them a pile of indecipherables waiting to be broken, a heap of WOKs waiting to be collated and a long list of agents waiting to be briefed. I then asked them what they could do to strengthen our depleted workforce.
Miss Furze’s expression said, ‘Fuck all,’ and Captain Henderson’s confirmed it.
I pushed the exhibits aside and waited for the worst.
Miss Furze reminded me that the staff she provided ‘didn’t grow on trees’, though I allowed them to walk about looking as they did. They came from the Ministry of Labour and National Service, which had fallen badly behind in its quota because of the huge demand for women to replace men.
Captain Henderson added that FANY recruitment had fallen off for much the same reasons, and because of competition from the WAAF and the WRNS (the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and the Women’s Royal Naval Service).
They then looked at each other sympathetically and took it in turns to emphasise that they couldn’t see any prospect of the situation improving.
According them the deference due to experts, I suggested that the real reason why so few girls we
re coming our way was that the officials who interviewed them hadn’t the slightest idea how to detect incipient code-mindedness.
Two explosions occurred in the immediate vicinity, one from anger, the other from natural causes.
Thundering from all points, Miss Furze accused me of being partly responsible for the shortage of applicants.
‘But what have I done?’ I asked in a rare burst of genuine innocence.
‘It’s what you haven’t done,’ she snapped. Waving an umbrella at me (on all-too-close inspection it turned out to be a finger), she pointed out that she’d twice asked me for a written analysis of the qualities I was looking for so that she could send a copy of it to the ministry but she might just as well have saved her breath. She also pointed out that I’d rejected fifteen of the candidates she’d sent me but hadn’t troubled to explain why.
Captain Henderson then joined in the indictment, stressing that I’d turned down twenty FANYs without giving her my reasons and still hadn’t listed the attributes her interviewers should look out for.
The truth was, I didn’t know myself.
I was wary of saying that if a girl admitted she loved music and crossword puzzles but was hopeless at arithmetic, we could usually repair the damage a maths teacher had done and turn her into a coder. They’d simply ask new candidates, ‘Do you like music and crossword puzzles and are you bad at arithmetic?’ and leave it at that. Nor did I relish the tedium of explaining how to measure a potential WOKmaker’s threshold of boredom. I also shirked trying to define the instinct which said, ‘This girl can do it.’
I promised to deliver a summary by the end of the week.
‘Which week?’ Miss Furze enquired sweetly.
The empresses then departed, leaving me no closer to the thousands of young hopefuls queuing round the country for a chance to help the war effort.
