Between Silk and Cyanide (16 page)

The disaster was Norway.

On 19 November thirty-four officers and men in two gliders were towed by two Halifaxes towards something approximating a flat strip of country near Rjukan. They were to be met on landing by the Grouse.

The clouds that night were so dense that the pilots decided to turn back thirty or so miles away from the dropping ground. One of the tow ropes snapped and the gliders crashed to the ground. The other Halifax crashed into a hill. Of the seventeen men in the first glider, nine survived. Four of them were taken to a hospital in Stavanger.

Air bubbles were injected into their veins by a Quisling doctor and they died at once. The other five were taken to a concentration camp and executed, their hands tied behind their backs with barbed wire. Only fourteen men survived the other plane crash and many of them were badly injured. They were rounded up by German security police and shot by a firing squad. The wounded were executed first, leaning against a wall.

Every one of the executed men was wearing a British army uniform. The Grouse were still safe.

At the beginning of December a new figure had begun prowling the corridors of Baker Street. He was a tall colonel, and Heffer was usually beside him.

Then the stranger began prowling alone.

He spent a long time in Dansey's office.

He did not come into mine.

In mid-December two signals officers were dismissed for inefciency. Three more were posted back to their units. There were rumours that other dismissals were on the way.

Then the prowler disappeared for a while…

The gut feeling about Holland was now lodged in the abdomen, where it kept better company.

On 16 December the Dutch section informed Boni that in the following moon period were dropping six (it turned out to be seven) containers, and that new poems for Boni, Parsnip and Cabbage would found in a small wooden box marked with a white cross. (Why did I keep seeing the agents in a large wooden box with no cross to mark it?) The containers were dropped on the night of the 22nd/23rd, and Boni acknowledged their safe arrival. He also acknowldged receipt of the poems.

I hadn't asked for them to be original compositions. It might alert the Germans in Holland that we were aware of the dangers of using famous quotations, and cause them to revise their opinion of any organization stupid enough to use the poem-code. SOE had somehow heard that Christmas was imminent, and the coders of Grendon were anxious for some leave. I volunteered to stand in on Christmas Day for whichever coder won me in a raffle. I didn't envy the supervisor who'd have to check the results. My handwriting was as illegible as the gut feeling.

On 22 December the stranger resumed his prowling.

I knew by now that his name was Colonel Nicholls. I also knew that he was doing here.

He was to take over the Signals directorate.

Heffer had promised Ozanne that he'd look for a suitable replacement for me. Instead he'd found one for Ozanne. If this wasn't an sample of SOE-mindedness, I wondered what was. I also wondered why Nicholls hadn't come anywhere near me, if only to say, 'Good riddance.'

I was convinced that the bad rubbish wouldn't have long to wait.

•       •       •

On Christmas Eve Joan Dodd presented me with a trial version of a silk WOK. The printing was too small and the silk would have to be chemically treated to make it easy to cut but it was the most beautiful sight I'd seen. My first impulse was to share it with Dansey and Heff, but with my job in the balance I knew that I daren't, and wore it as a pocket handkerchief instead.

The Xmas traffic was light and I was preparing to go home when Colonel Nicholls walked in and sat opposite me in silence. He was very tall, very thin, with a nose like a snooker ball which had been potted once too often. A red one. 'Right, Marks,' he said. 'Tell me all about it.'

Obeying him immediately I told him all that was wrong with the codes and right with the coders, and kept only one thing back: the breaking of the secret French code.

He closed his eyes after twenty minutes or so and seemed to be asleep, but something warned me that it was his way of listening. He looked up the moment I stopped talking.

I gave him my WOK to examine and thought for a moment that he was going to blow his nose on it. I then explained how it worked. He was silent for an agent's lifetime.

He spent ten minutes re-examining it and closed his eyes for five of them. He asked me to show him again how the security checks would operate and tried one for himself. 'Who advised you about this?' he asked quietly.

I told him that I'd discussed it with Dansey and Heffer. 'Yes, yes. But which cryptographer advised you?'

'Nobody has, sir.'

'Have you ever felt in need of expert advice?'

'Every minute of every day, sir.'

He asked whose advice I'd like if I could get it.

'If I could get it, sir, Colonel Tiltman's. He works at Bletchley Park.'

'Does he indeed? Have you met him?'

'No, sir. But I saw him once in a corridor at the code-breaking school.'

'Why didn't you meet him?'

'I wasn't considered promising enough, sir.'

He blew his snooker ball with his own pocket handkerchief. 'I'm afraid poor old John's got himself tied up in admin. It's a great waste his cryptographic talent.'

Poor old John?—Does he actually know him?

He stood up suddenly, and became a very full colonel indeed.

'Colonel Ozanne's shown me your coding report.'

Goodbye, SOE. It's been nice not knowing you.

'I completely endorse it, though it would have been better without your occasional flippancies.'

He cut me short in mid-apology.

'Colonel Tiltman endorses it too—he read it last week—you'll be seeing him shortly.'

He had a smile which could lift the black-out. 'I suggest you go hoe now. Happy Christmas, Marks.'

'Happy Christmas, Colonel Nicholls.'

All of us in SOE were as certain as we could be of anything that 1943 was going to be our make-or-break year. The make was likely to be the country sections' new operations; the break the poem-code which carried their traffic. I still had no authority to replace it with WOKs.

Nor did I have authority to install two girls on the top floor of Norgeby House to make WOK-keys by hand, but I'd done it with the help of Joan Dodd's circuit and hoped that it would be condoned. Acute shortage of aircraft and equipment were the main obstacles to SOE's Happy New Year, and the country sections' rivalry for the wherewithal to take the war to the enemy was a war in itself. The piece of equipment which indicated a country section's priority was a brilliant device called a Eureka which enabled an agent to guide an aircraft to a dropping ground without the use of lights or flares, no matter how dark the night.

The Eureka was simple to work. Its built-in transmitter was tuned to the wavelength of the aircraft's receiver, and by emitting a continuous high-frequency signal it provided a radio beam down which the aircraft could fly. Several of them had been dropped into Holland. I badly needed a Eureka of my own to help me resolve the niggling feeling that the Dutch traffic was continuing to emit a high-pitched bleep which I was still failing to pick up.

I had many reasons, some of which I knew, for being interested in an altogether more complex Eureka—the mind of Sigmund Freud. The great decoder of unconscious signals had left Austria in 1938 to seek sanctuary in England and he'd found some for himself amongst the bookshelves of 84. Freud was seldom well enough to leave his Hampstead home and couldn't climb the stairs to the third floor of 84, where rare religious and occult books were housed. Frank Doel, the shop's anchor-man, had gladly carried down to him everything that he'd wanted to see. He was particularly interested in anything which had a bearing on the life of Moses.
[6]
He was too ill to visit Marks & Co. again and died in 1939. As compensation for arriving five minutes too late to see him sitting there (J. B. Priestley had pulled out a chair for him), I was given signed copies of
The Interpretation of Dreams
and
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
They were addictive and should have been issued on prescription only.

I tried with uninformed enthusiasm to apply their principles to the psychopathology of SOE life. According to my understanding of Sigmund, I was in the market for Joan Dodd's sexual stationery, felt that my parents should be starving instead of the Grouse, and knew in my unconscious exactly what was wrong with the Dutch traffic.

lt must be a very dark night down there. The knowledge still refused surface.

From all that I'd heard about SOE's director of Finance, he was as good at causing nightmares as Freud at decoding them. Group Capitain Venner had been in SOE long enough to believe that he knew every fiddle there was. He was convinced that I'd worked a new one and was determined to find out how I'd managed it.

I had forgotten that my two WOK-makers could not live by codes alone and that someone would have to pay them a salary. That someone was Group Captain Venner.

The unauthorized employment of two lowly paid civilians hardly seemed to warrant the personal attention of a member of the Executive Council but I was duly summoned to Venner's office for a full accounting.

He wanted no time in skirmishing. 'I want to know how those girls got here.'

I began to explain the importance to SOE of the work they were doing.

'I don't give a damn if they're planning the invasion of Europe. I want to know how they got here.'

'They
are
planning the invasion of Europe, sir.'

'
What?
'

I explained that we were going to invade it with a new code, which the girls were making by hand, and that to vary the drudgery they helped Grendon to break indecipherables.

The office was filled with that most despairing of sounds, a finance director's sigh. 'Will you
please
tell me how they got here?'

'By bus, sir.'

I was afraid he was about to send for the fraud squad. Its SOE equivalent was Major O'Reilly.

'What are indecipherables?' he suddenly asked.

He hardly had time to cover up his secret documents before I was seated by his side giving him a potted version of how indecipherables were broken. I showed him why the permutations could run into tens of millions. He did a quick calculation on his pad and nodded. 'Do we get many?' he asked.

Anyone who'd say 'we' in circumstances like this must be a good man to work for.

'Some weeks we get none, sir. But most of the time they come at us from all over Europe. We get them from the Free French, the normal French, the Danes, the Norwegians, the… you've been an absolute Godsend, sir. May I go now?'

I rushed back to my own office before he could answer.

The unconscious signal had finally reached its Home Station and only God and Freud would know how I'd missed it.

With the exception of Parsnip's traffic, which was passed by Boni,
we had never received an indecipherable from Holland which had been caused by coding mistakes.

It was then that I realized the implications.

There was an essential piece of homework I had to do before trying to convince SOE of what the absence of indecipherables from Holland really meant. It was vital to establish whether Parsnip's indecipherables had been caused by Morse mutilation or mistakes in his coding. If it proved to be the latter, he was the only Dutch agent who was behaving normally.

Putting the code-groups of his seven indecipherables side by side with Boni's clear texts, I was about to start on a cryptographic jamboree to reconstruct whatever mistakes in coding Parsnip might have made when I remembered that his indecipherables had all been concerned with Intelligence matters. I also remembered that the Dutch sjgection's traffic had twice referred to a special code (Playfair) which Potato used for passwords and addresses. Supposing Parsnip were using a special code for his Intelligence messages and for some reason we had no knowledge of it?

I telephoned Bingham and demanded that he talk to me. Yes, of course he'd given Parsnip a reserve poem for his Top Secret Intelligence messages. Yes, of course he'd informed Dansey which poem he'd selected, and yes of course he'd confirmed it in writing, there must be a memo on file. What was all the fuss about anyway? I told him that it was just a routine check.

And of course there was no such memo on Dansey's meticulous file and of course Dansey had not been told by Bingham which reserve poem Parsnip was to use for Intelligence messages. We had tried a blanket attack on the wrong code.

Every one of Parsnip's messages came out perfectly on his reserve poem, and I was ashamed that I was glad. I could now say without any qualification to whoever would listen to me that
no Dutch agent had ever made a mistake in his coding…

|t was time to consult Heffer, the only man in SOE with whom it safe to think aloud.

Were the Dutch agents the only ones who never made mistakes their coding? Were they all Knut Hauglands? Or were their working conditions so secure that they had as much time as they needed to encode their messages and didn't have to worry about Germans on the prowl?

And could the Abor/Ebenezer security check anomalies still be attributed to bad training and forgetfulness when that same bad training that same forgetfulness, made them into flawless coders?

How much reliance could really be placed on the Dutch section's assurances that they regularly monitored their agents' safety? Were they relying on the reports of agents who might themselves be captured?

And was the traffic snarl-up no more than a natural hazard of clandestine communication? What about the four messages from London which Parsnip and Potato had been unable to decode? I'd checked and double-checked every one of them and they'd been encoded perfectly. Were Parsnip and Potato pretending they couldn't decipher them to postpone answering difficult questions and to avoid meetings which they couldn't possibly attend?