Between Silk and Cyanide (2 page)

Dansey came in half an hour later to see if I'd finished but I was still taking a frequency count (this is the cryptographic equivalent of feeling a pulse). He looked at me with a hint of disappointment then smiled encouragingly and went out. It was then ten o'clock. An hour later he was back again. The code's pulse was regular.

Dansey's wasn't. 'Marks,' he said softly.

'Sir?'

'Do you know how long it took my girls to crack that code?… twenty minutes.'

'Sir, it takes me thirty just to clean my glasses.'

I hoped he was joking. He closed the door behind him and I knew that he wasn't.

At one o'clock Lieutenant Owen put his head round the door, watched the poor struggler as long as he could bear to, and said I was free to go to lunch if I wished. I didn't.

At four o'clock a bespectacled young lady put some tea on my desk. She departed hastily with each eye laughing at a different joke.

At a quarter to five I knocked on the door of Dansey's office and put the decoded message in front of him.

Dansey and Owen sat in silence. They were in mourning for their judgement. I knew I had failed and hoped it wouldn't prevent them from giving someone competent a chance. I thanked my ex-bosses for my tea and turned to go.

'Leave the code here, please.'

'What code, sir?'

Dansey closed his eyes but they continued glaring. 'The code you broke it with!'

'You didn't give me one, sir.'

'What the hell are you talking about? How did you decode that message if I didn't give you one?'

'You told me to break it, sir.'

He was one of the few people who could look efficient with his mouth open. 'You mean you broke it,' he said, as if referring to his I heart, 'without a code?'

I had always understood that was what breaking a code meant, but it was no time for semantics. 'How was I expected to do it, sir?'

'The way the girls do, with all the bumph in front of them. A Straight forward job of decoding, that's all I was after! So we could test your speed. And compare it with theirs.'

'You mean, sir—that SOE is actually using this code?'

'We were,' said Owen. 'We have others now.'

They looked at each other. Something seemed to occur to them simultaneously. They operated like two ends of a teleprinter.

'Come with us. Marks.'

The three of us crowded into my workroom, which by now resembled an indoor tobacco plantation. Dansey didn't smoke. After a few moments of intensive rummaging he lifted a pyramid of papers and pointed to a blue card with a code typed on it in capital letters. He smiled as he held it up. His efficiency was vindicated. I walked up to him till I was level with the pips on his shoulder. I had a request to make and, for the first time in far too long, it wasn't wholly self-interested. 'May I see those other codes, sir?'

The Baker Street code room, which Dansey and Owen ran with an efficiency and precision 'Uncle Simon' would have envied, was essentially a main-line code room. Its function was to communicate with embassies and base stations around the world using code-books and one-time pads which provided the highest possible level of security and were cryptographically unbreakable even by Tiltman. It was the luxury end of the business.

The agents in the field had to use their codes in conditions of difficulty and danger which were unique in the history of coding. Their traffic was handled in that main-line code room by anyone available to do it. The volume of main-line traffic allowed no specialization. Each girl had to be a multi-purpose coder, able in theory to switch from main-line traffic to agents' at a moment's notice, though the system called for very different aptitudes, attitudes and disciplines. The responsibility for both main-line and agents' codes was vested in Dansey and Owen. Each of them had an asset which was rare in SOE—the ability to know what he was best at doing. They had repeatedly tried to persuade SOE that agents' traffic needed a cryptographer to supervise it—and permission had finally been given to add one to the staff. His brief, as SOE conceived it, was a simple one. All he would be required to do was 'keep an eye on the security of agents' traffic'—and perhaps break one or two of the indecipherable messages which poured in from the field.

The agents were using poems for their codes. Or famous quotations. Or anything they could easily remember. This concept of clandestine coding had been adopted by SOE because of a theory, traditional in Intelligence, that if an agent were caught and searched it was better security if his code were in his head. I had a gut feeling right from the start that this theory was wrong, and hoped that whoever advised SOE that the poem-code was suitable for agents would try performing its paper-gymnastics in the field.

The slightest mistake in the coding, a second's lapse of concentration, would render the entire message indecipherable. Frequently as much as 20 per cent of SOE's traffic could not be decoded due to agents' errors.

Whenever SOE received an indecipherable the agent responsible was instructed to re-encode it and have it ready for his next transmission.

I was prepared to fight this malpractice by whatever means I could. If some shit-scared wireless operator, surrounded by direction finding cars which were after him like sniffer dogs, who lacked electric light to code by or squared paper to code on—if that agent hadn't the right to make mistakes in his coding without being ordered to do the whole job again at the risk of his life, then we hadn't the right to call ourselves a coding department.

Surely the answer was simple? Squads of girls must be specially trained to break agents' indecipherables. Records must be kept of the mistakes agents made in training—they might be repeating them in the field. SOE would need more coders—and would have to compete for them in the far from open market. There must be no such thing as an agent's indecipherable.

Dansey didn't disagree with any of this. He simply pointed out a major obstacle of which I knew nothing. The name of that obstacle was Chain of Command.

All SOE's communications were under the control of the Signals directorate. Since these communications were worldwide, this empire-builder's paradise embraced main-line and agents' codes, all wireless stations, all wireless training schools, all wireless equipment—and one or two research establishments which no one had found time to visit.

The head of the Signals conglomerate. Colonel Ozanne, was a problem to which no solution compatible with law was remotely in sight. A one-man obstacle course, the colonel was opposed to any kind of change except in his rank. He elected to concentrate on main-line communications whilst taking an 'overall view' of everything else, though he often had difficulty in focusing his viewfinder, especially after lunch. His second in command. Colonel George Pollock, controlled the wireless stations, the training schools and agents' communications generally. This hierarchical structure put Dansey in the delicate position of being answerable to Ozanne for mainline codes and to Pollock for agents'.

Pollock's peacetime occupation posed problems of a special kind. He was a highly successful barrister who'd been well on his way to becoming a judge, and he used the Signals directorate as an extension of his chambers. All Dansey's requests were subjected to litigation and the verdict invariably went against him. Though Dansey never hesitated to stand up and be frequency-counted, he was in every respect outranked. The colonel disliked the untidy conveyancing which placed Dansey under his command but not under his control and had made several attempts to take agents' codes away from him, the last of which had almost succeeded.

Dansey warned me that I must do nothing which would give him an excuse to try again. In fact,' he said, 'you must go very carefully until your appointment is confirmed. And, after that, old boy—you must go more carefully still.'

I managed to comply for two whole weeks.

Even SOE knew that for security reasons all messages to and from the field had to be at least 200 letters long—one more dangerous disadvantage of the poem-code. The country section officers who originated messages had acquired the appalling habit of sending the same text to as many as a dozen different agents with only marginal changes of phrasing.

The poem-code simply couldn't stand up to these mass-produced texts. If the enemy broke one agent's messages they would know what to look for in their other intercepts—it would be an anagrammer's delight.

I made my first contact with Buckmaster of the French section, Hardy Amies of the Belgian, Hollingsworth of the Danish, Blizzard of the Dutch, Wilson of the Norwegian and Piquet-Wicks of another French section, though I wasn't yet sure why there had to be two. I asked them to paraphrase their messages and free their language whenever possible, and mistook their acquiescence for security-mindedness instead of the quickest way to get me off the telephone.

The next time I held out the begging-bowl on behalf of the infirm poem-code was for a very different ailment, and the remedy was even less to their liking.

To encode a message an agent had to choose five words at random from his poem and give each letter of these words a number. He then used these numbers to jumble and juxtapose his clear text. To let his Home Station know which five words he had chosen, he inserted an indicator-group at the beginning of his message. But if one message was broken—just one—the enemy cryptographers could mathematically reconstruct those five words and would at once try to identify their source.

Amongst SOE's best-sellers were Shakespeare, Keats, Tennyson, Moliere, Racine, Rabelais, Poe and the Bible.

One agent had been allowed to use the National Anthem, the only verses which he claimed to remember: suppose the enemy broke one of his messages and the five words he'd encoded it on were 'our', 'gracious', 'him', 'victorious', 'send', then God save the agent. They could sing the rest of the code themselves and read all his future traffic without breaking another message.

Even works less familiar to the Germans than the National Anthem—the Lord's Prayer perhaps—would cause them no problems. Reference books are jackboots when used by cryptographers. But if our future poem-codes were original compositions written by members of SOE, no reference books would be of the slightest help in tracing them. Not even Marks & Co.'s.

It would make it slightly more difficult for SOE's messages to be read like daily newspapers if we started a Baker Street poets' corner. I hadn't thought that writing poetry would be my contribution to Hitler's downfall, but it would at least prevent the Germans from using our traffic for their higher education. Striding up and down the corridors like the Poet Laureate of Signals, I did what I could to make my poems easy to memorize, less easy to anticipate, but I was obliged to turn to the country sections for help with their respective languages. I again telephoned Messrs Buckmaster, Amies, Hollingsworth, Blizzard, Wilson and Piquet-Wicks and asked if they would kindly write some poetry for me in their respective languages.

Rumour began to spread that there was an outbreak of insanity in the Signals directorate.

It was well founded. Agents were making so many mistakes in their coding that breaking their indecipherables single-handed against the clock was like being the only doctor in a hospital full of terminal patients. And the biggest indecipherable of all was SOE itself. Formal acceptance into the organization had brought me no closer to understanding it. All it had produced was a pass of my own which I could rarely find, and a desk in Owen's office which I rarely left. Although the code room was only a few yards away, I seldom visited it as main-line codes were none of my business. All maimed agents' messages were brought in to me as the girls had neither the time nor the training to mend the fractures.

The prospect of ever being able to form a code-breaking team seemed even more remote when Dansey's foreboding hardened into fact. Ozanne transferred all agents' traffic to the wireless station at Grendon Underwood. The coding was to be done by groups of FANYs (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry). The takeover was to be in August, only a few weeks away. Dansey would still be in charge of agents' codes—but this could be changed at the flick of a mood-swing. He warned me not to visit Station 53 without the approval of the Gauleiter of Signals.

While grim power-struggles were raging throughout every directorate in SOE, I was engaged in a still grimmer one with Edgar Allan Poe.

He was the favourite author of an officer on Buckmaster's staff named Nick Bodington, who went backwards and forwards to France as if he had a private ferry. For this trip's traffic he'd chosen an extract from 'The Raven'. Bodington's message was indecipherable and I'd been impaled on the bloody bird's beak for six consecutive hours.

The passage Bodington had chosen was:

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of someone gently rapping, rapping on my chamber door… If the indicator-group were correct, the five words he'd encoded the message on were: 'came', 'chamber', 'my', 'rapping', 'door'. When I tried decoding it on these five, all that emerged was the Raven's cackle.

Some 3,000 attempts later I discovered that the indicator was correct and the coding perfect. All Bodington had done was omit a 'p' from 'rapping', which turned it into 'raping' and screwed the lot of us. The worst part of these indecipherables was the time element. If an agent had a schedule for six o'clock, his message would have to be broken by then or his section head would insist that he repeated it. I didn't always manage to beat the clock, but only once gave up trying.

I had been working for two days on an indecipherable from Norway contributed by an agent called Einar Skinnarland. There was something very peculiar about Skinnarland's traffic. He gave some of his messages to a wireless operator to be transmitted in the normal way (SOE was blase enough to regard wireless traffic as normal) but, for reasons which the Norwegian section refused to divulge, at any rate to me, most of his traffic was smuggled into Sweden by courier and re-routed to London by cable or diplomatic bag. He had already sent one indecipherable, and the usually imperturbable Wilson had stressed to me that he must know its contents within the hour. An hour in coding terms is only a paranoid minute. I needed to know what was so special about Skinnarland's traffic—but Wilson rang off abruptly to take another call.