by Leo Marks
There was a chorus of approval at what they took to be my embarrassment.
‘Please tell the colonel he is absolutely right. I have been trying to deceive you. It’s a relief to admit it …’
There was a chorus of surprised approval. I avoided looking at Tommy.
‘… but I haven’t deceived you in the way you think …’ I pointed to the blackboard. ‘That isn’t the French code you’ve broken, it’s the British. Votre code is an even bigger fuck-up.’
Ignoring the gasps of astonishment, I turned the blackboard round. They found themselves looking at two more messages, one on top of the other like those they’d just dealt with.
I knew they were code-saturated but couldn’t stop now. I explained that these messages really were in Scapin’s code and had been encoded on the same transposition keys, and made them an offer: ‘Si vous voulez, I’ll show you how to break them on different keys but I’d have to keep you here a week.’
They didn’t seem to relish the prospect and reluctantly agreed to call out some suggestions when I en-pried them to break their own code.
Anxious to save time, I told them that cryptographers always searched messages for well-known names and asked if there were any famous Frenchmen they might find mentioned.
‘General de Gaulle’ was called out from all round the room, with ‘Passy’ a close second. Beneath GENERAL DE GAULLE some significant letters appeared:
GENERAL DE GAULLE
GIR
Someone called out ‘Giraud’ (de Gaulle’s arch-rival in France, who was favoured by the Americans) and a storm of booing broke out, accompanied by a few Gallic raspberries.
Ten minutes later they’d cracked both messages, and like most who played the parlour game were unable to conceal their sense of accomplishment.
Knowing that I was about to risk far worse than booing, I approached the real purpose of my visit. ‘This is the code we now give your agents …’ I whipped a WOK from my pocket.
‘A good code too,’ someone called out.
‘Don’t take my word for it. Talk to one of your own cryptographers – you’ve plenty of good ones. Ask him whether it wouldn’t be safer for you to use the British code for your secret messages than the one you’ve just broken. Je vous en prie to talk to him quickly for the sake of your agents.’
This put the chat amongst the pigeons more than anything else I’d said. Excited conversations broke out all round the room, and I noticed Valois whispering to a naval captain sitting in judgement beside him. The captain nodded and held up his hand. ‘I have a question, please …’
‘Je vous en prie,’ I replied, hoping it meant what I thought it did.
He seemed in no hurry to ask it, and his colleagues waited in respectful silence while I dangled from the yardarm.
‘If we use the British code for our messages, could the British read them?’
‘Oui, mon capitaine, at any time. Mais jamais les Boches.’
This was greeted by what sounded like applause, though it was so long since I’d heard any that I couldn’t be sure, and questions started coming from all directions. I turned to the interpreter to help with the answers.
‘Your English–French will do,’ someone called out.
An authoritative voice then took over. ‘I too have a question for Monsieur Marks, which I hope he will answer honestly.’
It was the colonel who’d tried to skewer me in whirlwind French. He renewed his efforts in excellent English. ‘Have you been breaking indecipherable messages in our code to save the agents from repeating them? – and because you knew we hadn’t staff to do it ourselves? The truth, please …’
I almost gave it but discovered I was human. ‘I was hoping not to be asked this because I’m ashamed of the answer.’
They waited expectantly.
‘I should have broken them and re-encoded them without you knowing if I’d been doing my job properly – but I shirked it! I was merde-scared of what SOE would do to me if they found out that I’d broken the agreement. Je apologise beaucoup.’
The colonel looked at me with a twinkle, then wrote rapidly on a notepad and showed it to the officers on either side of him. He then tore off the page and passed it to Valois, who nodded emphatically and passed it to mon capitaine, who also nodded and handed it to the interpreter.
A century or so later he translated. ‘They wish you to know they are satisfied you broke Scapin’s code and that Colonel Brook did not take it from his safe.’
I should have said, ‘Mille mercis,’ and left it there, but something popped out of my safe before I could stop it. ‘I have a favour to ask. Could you please give me another five minutes?’
‘Take as long as you wish,’ someone called out.
‘There’s something about the code department I want you to know. We’re not concerned with politics – yours or anybody else’s – unless we’re forced to be, which is what’s happened today … but there’s something you don’t seem to realise …’ I took a deep breath, which might well be my last. ‘The Free French aren’t the only ones involved in power struggles. SOE has its own Girauds and tells as many lies as you do. It’s unfortunate for you you’ve been caught out in a stupid one. Better luck next time.’
The interpreter was lagging behind but I couldn’t wait for him.
‘I have to tell you something personal. I’m too merde-scared to be an agent. I sit in the back room and do what I can to keep ’em safe. And next time I’m involved in a dispute with you, and there’s bound to be one, please remember this.’
I looked at all of them and at none of them. ‘I don’t give a shit if after the war your agents vote for de Gaulle or against him as long as they’re alive to vote. So for God’s sake change your secret code because the Boche can break it as easily as I can. Thanks for listening.’
I tried to reach the door but couldn’t distinguish between the Free French and their furniture. They seemed to be standing up, probably to lynch me.
The colonel put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Monsieur merde-scared,’ he said, ‘there is more than one kind of courage.’
I knew I’d reached the door because Tommy was holding it open. He pressed a handkerchief into my hand. ‘Wipe your forehead. It’s worse than Niagara.’
He then gave a wicked impersonation of my accent. ‘Le next time vous et moi meet je vous donnez un kick up the arse. Je shall aussi want mon mouchoir back, wrapped round a cigar si vous avez one. And now pissez-vous off, Monsieur Marksiavelli.’
I stumbled away like a drunken matelot.
I sobered up twelve hours later when Gubbins paid me a late-night visit. (He rarely wasted time on me during the day as he was even more of a midnight prowler than Hambro.) His face was medium ferocious. ‘There’s been an official request from the Free French which I find somewhat surprising.’
Marks’s head on a plateau or we take our business elsewhere …
‘They want you to have a meeting with one of their senior French cryptographers who’s flying in from Algiers.’ His mighty eyebrows arched. ‘I want to know exactly what you said at Duke Street.’
‘I wish I knew, sir.’
He laughed, and shook his head in despair. ‘Merci bien, Leo.’
I envied his accent.
On the night of 23 September Brossolette and Tommy boarded a Lysander and landed in France to start mission Marie-Claire.
FIFTY-THREE
Breaking Point
SOE rarely received official congratulations, except from itself, but the success of Monkey and the information our Danish agents had obtained about the Peenemünde rocket sites earned plaudits from Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff, which were all the sweeter because we’d excluded C from Monkey and scooped them on Peenemünde. But the glow didn’t last long, and between mid-September and the end of October a series of upheavals and reshuffles extended our in-built absorbers to breaking point.
Sir Charles Hambro resigned as CD and was replaced by Gubbins.
H
utchison resigned as head of RF section to train as an agent at the age of fifty. His replacement (Sweet-Escott) was replaced at short notice by Colonel Dismore, who chose Tommy as his deputy, a move so wise few of us could credit it.
Captain Uren of the Balkans directorate was sent to prison for passing information to the Russians.
One effect of these developments was to turn Baker Street into a debating society and some believed it should remain one.
Hambro’s Departure
The consensus of uninformed opinion was that Sir Charles resigned because of a disagreement with our minister over Greece but that he’d still be with us if his senior colleagues hadn’t been stricken with laryngitis when invited to support him.
The Arrest of Captain Uren
This was known to few people in Baker Street, and I was unlikely to have been one of them if Major O’Reilly (my godfather) hadn’t found an entry in Uren’s diary (in red ink?): ‘Appointment with Marx [sic] to discuss codes.’
He sent for me and demanded to know what had taken place at the meeting with no details omitted.
I told him that Uren had called on 19 July to see the new codes which were being issued to Hungarian agents and that I’d shown him a WOK and a letter one-time pad. He’d asked if he could borrow them for a day as it would help him and his colleagues to prepare suitable camouflage, and I’d readily agreed. He’d returned them to my office the following morning.
The major anxiously enquired what harm it would do if Uren had shown them to a Russian agent. I replied that it wouldn’t matter if he’d shown them to Hitler as they were different for every agent. To reassure him still further, I added that if he showed them to Stalin as well it might even help the war effort, because if the Russians copied them the Germans could no longer read their traffic.
Sharply reminding me that this was an extremely serious matter, he warned me that Soviet agents were trying to infiltrate SOE and that they’d be particularly interested in Signals. He instructed me to bring anything suspicious to his immediate attention, but didn’t tell me what symptoms to look for.
He also instructed me to give his best wishes to ‘little Benny’, which would have been bad security, as Father still didn’t know that his best friend and I worked for the same organisation, but I agreed to do so to end the interview.
There was just time to change the security checks of every agent known to Uren.
The worst of the autumnal heart-stoppers concerned two old favourites (it was wrong to have any but impossible not to) who were causing great alarm.
Noor Inayat Khan (I rarely thought of her as Madeleine) had astonished all who believed they knew her by continuing to be the only WT operator in Paris on whom F section could rely. Still living in Paris (now almost as dangerous as Amsterdam), she’d sent a brief message in mid-September naming the few agents who’d survived the Prosper collapse. It was perfectly encoded with its security checks present. She resumed WT contact at the end of September and organised an arms drop.
Knowing the risks she was taking, Buckmaster ordered her to return to London, but she refused to leave until she was satisfied that he’d found a replacement for her. He assured her that he had, and she finally agreed to be picked up by Lysander in mid-October. She then went off the air for ten days, and missed the moon period. She surfaced again on 18 October with a new batch of messages, and although their security checks were correct the first message had a transposition key eighteen letters long.
I immediately informed Buckmaster that this was a special security check which she was to use only if she were caught. This confirmed his suspicions that she was in enemy hands, as the style of her new messages had changed, but he intended to reply to them as if nothing were amiss and to continue two-way traffic with her.
I said a silent prayer that Noor was having one of her lapses, but knew I was having one of my own not to accept the truth.
The other contributor to restless nights (which Mother attributed to malnutrition) was Tommy.
He and Brossolette had arrived in Paris on 21 September to make contact with Serreules, and on 26 September Tommy sent a message which his operator was unable to transmit until 14 October, by which time Tommy had sent another.
The first message reported that he and Brossolette were extremely concerned about Serreules’s lack of security, that the number of arrests was increasing daily and that Morinaud (who was about to be appointed one of the secret army’s new leaders) had been arrested and had swallowed his L-tablet before he could be tortured.
The second message reported that Serreules had been arrested at the end of September and had left a number of en clair messages in his flat as well as a list of his principal contacts, which the Germans were believed to have found. He added that the situation was even worse than he and Brossolette had feared and that he would keep his future traffic to a minimum.
However, he wasn’t completely out of touch with London. Barbara sent en clair messages to him every day via the BBC which were prefaced Du moineau au lapin (From the sparrow to the rabbit).
Another of Tommy’s sparrows also had a message for him, but there was no way I could send it. I wanted him to know that a senior French cryptographer had arrived from Algiers and that I was about to have a meeting with him.
I’d been told by RF section that my visitor’s name was Commandant Cassis, that he had to return to Algiers within twenty-four hours and that he was now in Duke Street hoping I’d phone him as soon as possible. I contacted him immediately, and he enquired in serviceable English if I had a little time to spare. I told him that I’d be available for as long as he needed, and he at once asked if I would prefer to meet him at Duke Street or Dorset Square or perhaps would like him to call upon me.
Sensing from his tone what his real choice would be, I invited him to come to my office, and he accepted before I’d finished the sentence. He would be the first Free Frenchman who’d been allowed to visit my workshop, and I prepared a pass for him without asking permission. I then instructed Muriel to make no more appointments for the rest of the day and to put no phone calls through once he’d arrived unless I gave her our private signal (two bleeps on the buzzer), in which case she was to come in immediately with an urgent summons to the Executive Council.
To do justice to this special occasion, I then went to sleep for fifteen minutes.
Commandant Cassis was slender, grey-haired and wore his uniform as if it were a fine French binding. He smiled at me from the doorway, took my outstretched hand in both of his and thanked me for seeing him at such short notice. He then accepted a seat at my cluttered desk and seemed instantly at home.
I had an unaccountable feeling that I was in the presence of a Gallic Tiltman.
He wasted no time on the secret French code except to say with a craftsman’s sympathy, ‘What suffering it must have caused you.’ But he didn’t enquire what steps I might have taken to alleviate it.
He then meticulously examined three WOKs and asked if the keys had been produced by machine or by hand.
When I described how the WOK-makers shuffled their counters he nodded his approval. ‘Safer human tiredness than a machine’s,’ he said, which led us to a short discussion about the problem of producing figures which were genuinely random.
He then asked what we did to convince agents that they must destroy their keys as soon as they’d used them, and I told him about the briefing officers who instilled the necessity into them by every means at their disposal.
Again that nod of approval. ‘They will not want to destroy such silks,’ he said. ‘Good to give to their ladies after the war.’
He examined the security checks as if his own life depended on them, and decided they couldn’t be improved.
I then showed him a LOP. It was clear that he hadn’t seen one before, and it took him all of ten seconds to grasp its significance. ‘A one-time pad in letters,’ he exclaimed.
He reminded me of Father holding an original Caxton.
‘
Enough here for a hundred messages each of the ways?’
I nodded.
‘And the least number of letters an agent need send is ten? – twenty?’
‘Five if all he wants to say is merde.’
He looked at me as if he were an exile in sight of his long-lost land. ‘For us?’ he said quietly. ‘You will be giving them to us?’
‘If Duke Street will accept them.’
He pushed back his chair and stood up. But not to leave. He was in urgent need of pacing room, a feeling I knew well. ‘Forgive me to ask this but time is short. Are you perhaps preparing other codes as well?’
‘Yes,’ I said, delighted to be asked. Without telling him that no one else had seen it, I showed him a code book I was preparing which had a thousand-word vocabulary and which was to be printed on silk and used in conjunction with a letter one-time pad. I explained that code books would save valuable air time in the run-up to D-Day and on D-Day itself as it would reduce the length of agents’ messages, though I wasn’t sure if they could be persuaded to use them.
Puzzled by his lack of response, I pointed out that the code groups had been structured to minimise the effects of Morse mutilation, a major problem with all our traffic.
He spent a full five minutes examining this claim, and I wondered if he’d found a flaw in it.
When he finally turned to me his eyes were as hard as Tiltman’s when he’d tried to persuade me that SOE didn’t need LOPs. ‘Monsieur Marks …’ I almost bowed to myself. ‘It would be a great help if we could now talk in absolute confidence … a very great help indeed.’
But I couldn’t forget that momentary hardness and suspected that I’d been softened up for this moment. ‘I can’t promise absolute confidentiality until I’ve some idea of what it concerns.’
He thanked me for my frankness, which he’d heard about from Duke Street, and said that he’d rely on my goodwill to the Free French ‘as to how much I need repeat of the delicate matters he now wished to confide in me’.
