by Leo Marks
I learned from Maurice that she’d committed many indiscretions, including leaving her signal plan and poem in the hallway of a flat, where they’d remained open for inspection for several hours. Bodington had urged her to ‘lie low’ till London instructed her otherwise, and she’d agreed to do so. But Maurice doubted if she would.
I warned my successor that ‘lying low’ was as close to lying as Noor could ever get and that because of her attitude I’d given her a special security check which would be new to the Germans and which she was to use only if she were caught. (Her transposition key must be eighteen letters long.) I also warned him that there was no guarantee that she’d remember it (though I was convinced that she would), and I urged him to take special care with every message she encoded.
The other event concerned Hitler’s intention of razing London to the ground. According to Duus Hansen, as reliable a source as any in the field, the rocket sites at Peenemünde had become a tug-of-war between C and SOE.
On 12 August he sent a message to Sweden asking which organisation he was supposed to be working for. He was especially keen to know whether he should send information about the rocket sites to the Danish section of SOE or to Hannibal (a department in C he’d previously worked for and was still in touch with). He complained that both organisations were asking him to obtain the same information!
Turnbull sent him a long message (repeated to London in main-line code) stressing that operational matters were SOE’s responsibility and that he should send his information to SOE’s Stockholm office. It would then be forwarded to SOE’s London HQ, which would be responsible for distributing it!
I reminded my successor that Hansen’s silks and security checks were being delivered to him by courier and that although the Stockholm office had so far proved reliable, no chances should be taken and Hansen must be asked a number of test questions when he began using his WOK.
I was in the middle of dealing with our techniques for breaking indecipherables when Tommy walked in wearing his Croix de Guerre uniform. He was standing by to mount a two-man mission with Brossolette, code-named Marie-Claire. Its function was to restore morale in the field following the capture of Moulin and to establish a new chain of command. Tommy had been selected for the mission by de Gaulle and Passy – yet another sign of their confidence in him.
He looked at me sharply and asked what was wrong.
I told him that SOE was sending me to Cairo to convert the natives to Judaism.
He knew my domestic situation and it invariably amused him, but there was no humour in his face as he studied me thoughtfully. He asked me whether I’d like him to keep in touch with my parents while I was away. If so, he’d introduce himself as my Ministry of Labour supervisor.
I couldn’t let him see how much his offer had affected me, and for the first time since I’d known him I averted my face from my favourite supervisor.
One half of Marie-Claire closed the door behind him.
I realised that I hadn’t even asked him what he’d wanted.
I tried to define ‘SOE-mindedness’, but soon gave up in despair (perhaps I’d understand it from the other side) and gave the document to Muriel for typing, warning her to take no copies.
Unaware that she was my executor, she began work at once.
Alone in a way that was new, I made a contribution to the dittybox, wondering if it would be my last:
We have a little time left
The wise doctor said
Unless there’s a miracle
Which is another man’s trade
Selfish as always
I’ve started missing you now
Want to say so
Don’t know how
Want to hug you
Don’t know if I should
Hope you understand
I’d take your place if I could.*
I was in the middle of adding a codicil about Nick and Heffer when Muriel put her head round the door and, without a trace of regret, reminded me that I had a plane to catch.
Note
* Issued in September ’44 to a Jedburgh. He was killed a week after he’d landed in France.
FORTY-NINE
A Treat for the Natives
‘You must forget all about Baker Street for the next seven days, and that includes Monkey. Keep everything for Cairo. God knows it needs it.’
Nick’s parting instructions
On 24 August one of the war’s lesser events took place outside the main entrance of Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo, where a room had been reserved for me – probably by mistake.
My braces broke, and my trousers slid gracefully to the ground. The next to descend were the shimmering underpants which only yesterday my tearful mother had lovingly pressed.
She would have been proud of the interest they aroused in the open-mouthed natives. At the time of the involuntary exposure I was clutching a briefcase full of silks in one hand and my solar topi in the other. Reluctant to relinquish the former for security reasons, I put the latter between my knees to protect an indispensable appendage from sunstroke. I then bent down to retrieve my dignity, affording the fascinated drivers and pedestrians a view of kosher rump, which Nick may not have had in mind when he instructed me to keep everything for Cairo.
The honking of car horns was followed by a round of applause from the direction of the hotel.
Looking up, I saw a world-famous American watching me from the veranda. He continued to watch me as I hobbled towards the entrance, clutching my trousers, then leaned across the veranda for a closer inspection. His voice was marginally less carrying than Churchill’s and almost as famous. ‘Excuse me, sir. What are you going to do for an encore?’
Wishing he knew, sir hobbled inside.
Next time we met, my fingers would be free to give him an appropriate answer.
SOE’s HQ was in Rustom Buildings, a large grey-pillared block in the centre of an otherwise respectable residential area. Every taxi-driver in Cairo knew the address and charged double for reaching it.
Dansey, one of the few people whom khaki shorts aged, was waiting at the reception desk. Handing me my pass, he warned me not to lose it or I’d have to buy a new one from the head porter at Shepheard’s. He then led me into an anteroom and briefed me in undertones.
The situation as he saw it was ‘pretty damn serious’. The main-line traffic had been allowed to pile up and more coders would have to be sent from London to deal with the backlog. I must make up my own mind about agents’ traffic, but he thought he should warn me that the silks I’d sent from London ‘hadn’t caught on’ and my visit was considered completely unnecessary.
He then outlined what he referred to as ‘the drill’.
Cairo’s chief of staff, Brigadier Keble, would send for me some time this evening as he was far too busy to see me before, but I probably wouldn’t meet the head of Signals (Ridley-Martin) at all as he was away for a week. Nor was I likely to meet his deputy (Gerry Parker), who was also away, but the third in command (Bill Chalk) would look in some time this afternoon to say hello. He suggested that I should spend the whole day ‘getting the feel of the code room’ until Keble was ready to send for me.
He then looked at me appealingly. ‘Don’t rub him up the wrong way, old chap. He’s a short-tempered little sod at the best of times!’
Picking up my solar topi (I’d sworn ‘on Mother’s life’ never to be without it), I assured him I’d be careful and followed him upstairs.
To the untrained eye (as great a liability in wartime as the untrained heart) all code rooms looked alike. But to those afflicted with cipher awareness, every one had an aura of its own, and Cairo’s was as bowed as the heads of its coders.
It was a multi-purpose code room, and the girls were required to switch from main-line traffic to agents’ and back again, a malpractice which London had long since abandoned. (Dansey had been the first to agree that the systems needed different skills and temperaments and that agents’ traffic should be a separat
e entity.) Many of the girls on the present shift (including the supervisor) were veterans from Grendon, where they’d been trained to behave like mini-cryptographers rather than cipher clerks. They watched with growing apprehension as Dansey led me to an empty desk in the corner. He then explained the mechanics of the office, told me where to find him if I needed his help and left me to get on with it.
The facts emerged slowly, like soldiers from a brothel.
The agents were given novels from which to obtain their transposition keys, though several had been issued with magazines and one appeared to be using a military manual. The volume of traffic was heavy, and at peak periods several hundred messages a day were exchanged with agents in Greece, Yugoslavia, Tehran, Istanbul, Crete and a number of Balkan towns and villages. There were also two-way exchanges with long-range desert groups.
Even the most rudimentary precautions were ignored, and I found eight examples of the same transposition keys being used for messages of identical length (cryptographically fatal) and six examples of messages which contained fewer than fifty letters. (One was from the Home Station.) A file marked ‘Indecipherables’ disclosed that fifteen had been received in the past week and that in each case the miscreants had been instructed to re-encode them.
I casually enquired if any attempts were made to break agents’ indecipherables, and there was a bewildered shaking of heads. As one renegade put it, ‘They have a lot more time than we have.’ I barely recognised the Grendon coders as they plodded away at their desks.
But the biggest shock was reserved for midday, when I barely recognised the code room.
It was suddenly invaded by a succession of captains and lieutenants who weren’t members of the Royal Corps of Signals (their only discernible asset). They were allowed to saunter into the code room, examine the novels and magazines which were being used as codes, then saunter out again carrying whichever took their fancy. A casual enquiry elicited that they read them on the roof during the lunch hour but always returned them.
Determined to repel the invaders and equally anxious to pee, I followed a young lieutenant and his novel out of the code room, but instead of going upstairs, where I presumed the roof to be, he went in the opposite direction and headed for the exit.
Tapping him on the shoulder, which I was barely able to reach, I introduced myself as the head of Codes from London. I then informed him that on the instructions of General Gubbins the lending library was closed for the duration and suggested that if he were short of reading matter he should write to an excellent bookshop in London whose address was 84 Charing Cross Road.
The bemused lieutenant surrendered the book without the slightest opposition. It turned out to be The Four Just Men, and I felt like the fifth.
I then asked if he’d be kind enough to show me the way to the gents.
Five minutes later I returned to a code room which was even more badly in need of a flush.
By mid-afternoon I’d broken my first Cairo indecipherable and was embarking on my second when Major Chalk (number three in the Signals hierarchy) walked in ‘just to say hello’, as Dansey had predicted.
He was a professional signals officer and it soon became apparent that he knew more about wireless than he did about codes. He expressed the hope that I’d find nothing wrong with Cairo’s. I didn’t tell him that so far I’d found nothing right.
I was summoned to Keble’s office at 7.30 p.m. Dansey and Chalk were already there.
The ‘short-tempered little sod at the best of times’ didn’t look up for almost a minute while I stood in front of his desk clutching my briefcase and solar topi. He then shook hands perfunctorily and pointed to a chair.
He had a ginger moustache and eyes which complemented it. They informed me within seconds that he wasn’t going to be taught his business by a young pup of a Jew-boy who, like most of his kind, had managed to avoid military service. He eyed my solar topi as if it were a Hasidic skullcap.
I took my WOKs and LOPs from my briefcase, where they’d been refrigerating, and began explaining their function.
He interrupted me to say that it was time ‘you people in London’ realised that Cairo’s clandestine communications had damn-all in common with Europe’s. As for ‘those silk knickers’ I was trying to peddle, he’d been advised on good authority, including that of a naval cipher expert from Alexandria, that the codes issued to agents were secure enough for all practical purposes and he saw no reason to interfere with them.
I agreed that Cairo’s agents operated in different circumstances from ours but suggested that cryptographers were the same the world over. His eyes said, ‘So are Yids,’ and he ordered me to come to the point.
Desperate to rescue a joke which now couldn’t possibly come off, I said that cryptographers would have far more to show for their efforts if they examined silk knickers for what they normally concealed than if they probed them for agents’ traffic. I then hastily pointed out that silk codes would put an end to indecipherables, provide reliable security checks and cut agents’ air time in half.
‘Try not to make too much of a nuisance of yourself, old chap …’
Old chap stood up. ‘Brigadier, if you don’t believe that your agents’ traffic is wide open to cryptographic attack, could you please provide me with a blackboard, risk wasting an hour of your valuable time and allow me to prove to you how vulnerable it is.’
End of meeting.
Twenty-four hours later I was too tired, torpid and listless to care about anything. Nor did I need to worry any more about making a nuisance of myself. I simply didn’t have the energy. I attributed the improvement to the change of climate and to Cairo’s infectious attitude, ‘What happens will happen.’
It was only when I could no longer distinguish a WOK from a LOP or a coder from a code book that I realised that I’d picked up a bug, and that it was making itself at home in its new accommodation.
I was given an injection by a medically qualified pig-sticker and an even sharper one by a bespectacled lady who approached the desk as if about to claim alimony. She informed me that she was Brigadier Keble’s secretary and that I was to report to him in an hour to give a demonstration. She didn’t say of what, but added without much enthusiasm that she would return and collect me.
I managed to encode two messages and must have dozed off, because when I opened one eye the coders were tittering and the bespectacled lady was beckoning to me from the doorway.
Trying to keep pace with her as she strode down the corridors was like crossing the Gobi Desert carrying a camel. She escorted me into what she described as the ‘lecture room’, where twenty or so uniformed tribesmen were clustered around campfires which turned out to be desks. I glimpsed Keble’s red tabs shining like traffic lights signalling stop. A blue blur on one side of him crystallised into a naval commander, and a brown one on the other side into Dansey and Chalk. The haloes at the back were groups of coders flanked by their supervisors.
Mounting a mile-long platform an inch at a time, I confronted a large Nubian with crossed arms, which turned out to be a blackboard. He had coloured chalks on his person where lesser men had testicles, and I wrote my messages on his chest in block capitals which were twice their normal size as I had half my normal confidence.
I then left the room completely. I was in the Quirinale with Mallaby, in Peenemünde with Duus Hansen, in Duke Street with Tommy. And in Park West being cosseted.
I had no idea what I said. I heard the phrase ‘you Cairo-practitioners’ and knew I was accusing them of something but wasn’t sure what. I also heard someone who sounded like me saying, ‘No agent must stay on the air a second longer than necessary,’ and thoroughly agreed with him.
A few hundred bewilderments later I heard suggestions being called out from all around the room which either meant I was being told to fuck off or that I’d reached that point in the lecture where I invited the audience to become cryptographers.
I found myself replacing the chalk, and realised tha
t the messages had been broken and that I must have given the congregants some help or they’d still be floundering. I knew that I was, but they were clearly waiting for me to build to a climax.
But with what?
Remembering past successes, a sure sign of ageing, I told them about the first agent I’d briefed, who’d been as frightened of going into the field as I’d been of meeting him, who was convinced that he’d make mistakes in his coding and who’d recited his poem to me as if it were a personal appeal to his Home Station.
I spoke on his behalf. It began:
Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of being slow …
And ended:
Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.
Be near me.
The final ‘Be near me’ was mine, and I hoped that Tennyson would forgive me.
I stumbled off the platform and suddenly found myself in Keble’s office, wondering who’d carried me there.
Giving me no indication of whether the past hour had been a disaster, he instructed me to write a full report on agents’ ciphers, which must be presented to him no later than forty-eight hours before I left Cairo (my departure was set for 3 September, five days away). His secretary would type the report but I must allow her time to finish it, as she was extremely busy with important correspondence. He then returned to his own.
