Between Silk and Cyanide (21 page)

The signal-planning department had been instructed to produce new signal-plans which would allow operators to stagger their frequencies and transmission times. The BBC's en clair broadcasts could in future be monitored by Major Buxton, who was to be appointed SOE's liaison officer with the BBC. He then made an announcement which got less audience response than any so far.

The OSS was planning to start its own WT station under the auspices of SOE and we would have to give the Americans every possible cooperation.

A gadget called a 'squirt transmitter' was now in production. It would enable agents to transmit messages at very high speed. The enemy would find it difficult to intercept 'squirt traffic' unless they had similar equipment.

I glanced at Heffer, who had engineered the arrival of this Signals messiah. He had the proprietorial look of a satisfied sponsor.

Nicholls now dealt lovingly and at length with the technical changes which were to be introduced to improve the quality of the Home Station's transmissions. The congregation started taking notes, anxious not to miss a single miracle.

I made one too: 'How long, oh Lord, before he talks about codes? Perhaps the new equipment was so efficient we could dispense with them.

I tried to project the thought of WOKs to the man on the mountain but he was imparting his vision of a new kind of wireless mast.

Insular as ever, I drifted off—and landed in Holland. None of these innovations, excellent though they were, would help me to prove that a single Dutch agent had been caught. Even the early machine code-groups, if Bletchley ever produced them, were unlikely prove that Herr Giskes was SOE's most regular penfriend. I wished could put a face to him. I imagined him as an Ozanne with brains.

I thought of Ozanne brought me sharply out of the Dutch clouds. Nicholls had changed the subject and the audience was fidgeting subtly so it might be important.

A Security and Planning Office was to be started in Norgeby House. Its principal function would be to monitor the security of agents' traffic.

I hoped that whoever did the monitoring would be able to spare a moment for the Dutch because I was about as much use to them squirt-transmitter which had run out of squirt. The answer did no lie in further research, it lay in making something happen. But what? Could we set a trap for the Germans? Could we give them a chance to make a mistake without alerting them to our suspicions? Could we take the code war to them?

I fell into the trap of trying to devise a 'Plan Giskes' while Nicholls talked on, and suddenly realized that there was something different feeling in the room.

It was completely silent.

The proclamation was over and everyone was looking at me! Had I been thinking aloud?

I intercepted a glance at the Messiah. He wasn't exactly angry but his sigh was a gust of wind which I felt in my marrow-bone. 'For the benefit of those at the back who may not have heard me,' he said, 'I will repeat what I have just announced.'

As of February agents' codes were to be split entirely from mainline codes. The two departments would function as separate entities. Main-line codes would remain under the control of Captain Dansey, assisted by Lieutenant Owen. Agents' codes would be under the control of DYC/M, who would be answerable directly to the head of Signals. DYC/M would move to Norgeby House in February. One of his functions would be to act as field-cipher representative in the Security and Planning Office. DYC/M's symbol would remain unchanged when he took up his appointment as head of agents' codes.

I realized that I was DYC/M.

That February was only a few weeks away.

That I was scared out of what remained of my wits.

And that Nicholls, Dansey and Owen were smiling at me.

The Signals directorate invaded Norgeby House in the first week of February despite sporadic resistance from the sitting tenants. To everyone's surprise (except Nicholls's) the new distribution department took over from the old without one message being delayed and only two going to the wrong country sections, and the new Signals Officee was a great social success as country section officers, who rarely had a chance to meet each other, found it an excellent place for a quiet chat. Occasionally they came to it for Signals enquiries.

I had been allotted a room on the first floor and awarded custody of a secretary with sunset-red hair. Her name was Muriel Eddy and she was the equivalent of a typing pool.

I learned on my first day that there was a drawback to my new accomodation. I had to share it with two formidable ladies who'd been brought into SOE by Nicholls, presumably as part of his unlisted improvements.

Mrs Charlotte Denman was a short grey-haired chain-smoker who spoke fluent French and whose job was to liaise with the French, Free French and Belgian sections.

Mrs Molly Brewis was a large red-faced chain-smoker who spoke fluent Italian and Dutch and whose job was to liaise with the country sections in preparing signal-plans.

The enforced intimacy became a serious risk when I discovered that the ladies had had a longstanding professional and personal relationship with Nicholls and that they were his close confidantes. They spent most of their time filing his secret reports and conferring with him in his office. They always took their confidential files with them.

The ladies and I were rapidly bonded into a unit by SOE's most common denominator—ignorance. The subject we knew least about was the newly formed Security and Planning Office. None of us understood its function until a memo from Nicholls informed us that we were the Security and Planning Office and would shortly be sent our terms of reference.

Our security to date consisted of the ladies' attempts to hide from me what they were filing and mine to hide from them that I was breaking secret French messages. There were few signs of any planning and still less of any progress. But our terms of reference as room-mates were clearly established: they pretended to take no notice at all of what I was doing and I did my best to reciprocate.

We were not the only ones playing charades.

A spate of perfectly encoded messages arrived from Ebenezer, Trumpet and Boni, telling the Dutch section what it most wanted to hear.

The build-up of the Secret Army was steadily progressing. Akkie was in contact with the Council of Resistance and reception committees were being prepared to receive the Golf team which was to guide Jambroes into Spain via the French and Belgian escape routes.

These escape routes, particularly the Belgian ones, were lifelines not only for SOE's agents but for Allied airmen stranded in enemy territory. If the Dutch agents were blown, it could lead to the escape routes themselves being penetrated and the damage could be incalculable, but I still couldn't provide what SOE would consider proof that a single Dutch agent had been caught. Nor could I think of a way to entrap Herr Giskes.

Over a month had elapsed since Nick had dangled the possibility of introducing me to Tiltman of Bletchley to discuss my idea of giving every agent an individual WOK printed on silk, but the miracle still hadn't happened and I no longer believed that it would.

Nor had Nick allowed me to recruit more WOK-makers until an all-clear had been given for the system to be adopted. When I'd asked him how much longer we had to wait for the siren to be sounded, he'd assured me that a decision would be reached within a week.

I didn't point out that a week was seven days longer than most agents' life expectancy if we continued to give them poem-codes. I had four more days to wait.

A new menace emerged in the first week of February which threatened SOE with extinction. Since there had been only eighteen months' advance notice of it, it took Baker Street as a whole (which occasionally it was) completely by surprise. That menace was C's determination to expunge SOE from the Intelligence alphabet.

Although the state of the civil war between our two organizations was supposed to be known only to CD, Gubbins and the Executive Council, I was briefed on it by Heffer, from whom nothing was secret except how to hurry.

According to the Guru, C's latest campaign to close SOE down, take us over or restrict our activities until we were operationally neutered had come to Downing Street's attention, and was soon to be fought out in Cabinet by our respective ministers. Our chief cornerman in this sacrosanct arena was Lord Selborne, the Minister of Economic Warfare. 'The Bastards of Broadway' (which was what I called C in rare moments of understatement
[10]
) were represented by the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. The key issue was SOE's role in the invasion of Europe, and the timing of the Bs of B's attack was inspired.

After two years of sustained effort but sporadic achievement, SOE's libility with the War Cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff and itself was higher than 84's with the tax inspector. Our political manoeuvres, forward planning and operational techniques were all suspect, and the scale of our D-Day participation would be determined by the Chiefs of Staff. This formidable body—accustomed losing its battles by orthodox means—didn't share Churchill's ethusiasm for irregular warfare, and had refused to give SOE an official directive setting out its terms of reference and operational responsibilities. Without this Intelligence equivalent of a banker's reference SOE would have no chance of getting its proper quota of aircraft and equipment and would be unable to fulfil its growing commitments to the agents in the field or to their governments-in-exile.

If SOE was ever to get that long-awaited directive instead of a winding-up order, it had above all to convince Lord Selborne—and through him the War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff—that the Secret Armies and Resistance groups it claimed to be forming not only existed, but would be ready by D-Day to fulfil Churchill's mandate to 'Set Europe Ablaze'. The Executive Council's hopes of obtaining this proof centred on the prospects of thirteen men. The Golf quartet was expected to bring Jambroes out of Holland; the Arquebus trio to establish de Gaulle's leadership in France; and the six Gunnersides to blow up a heavy-water plant in Norway. The vital thirteen were now in the final stages of their training.

But there was one more major problem in this last-chance month. The outcome of the battle with C was likely to depend on the responses of the Americans.

C and SOE were competing for their custom and, in an effort to acquire the bulk of it, CD had sent a telegram in main-line cipher to Bill Stevenson, our man in Washington, and asked him to show it to Bill Donovan, the head of OSS: 'SOE WILL BE READY BY FEBRUARY AT THE LATEST TO MOUNT OPERATIONS INTO FRANCE, SCANDINAVIA AND THE LOW COUNTRIES AND I AM CONFIDENT THAT THE FEBRUARY MOON, WHICH STARTS ON THE 14TH OF THE MONTH, WILL MARK THE TURNING POINT IN EUROPEAN RESISTANCE.'

I did my best not to shout. 'Doesn't CD realize that the Low Countries' security couldn't be lower?' He left without comment.

Until my appointment as head of agents' codes I'd been head of nothing except a queue for a sweet shop, and the main advantage of my promotion (apart from acquiring Muriel) was the ease with which I was able to intercept secret French messages before they were sent to Duke Street. The supervisor of the new distribution room, a FANY sergeant I intended to head-hunt, had been told by her predecessor that all incoming code-groups had to be checked by me as soon as they arrived, and she usually had them waiting.

Returning to my office clutching Salmon's latest, I was dismayed to find Nick seated at my desk. He was also clutching a document which he held out to me in silence.

It was a curt note from Gambier-Parry, C's head of Signals, stating that the early Dutch code-groups which I wanted to examine were no longer in his possession as all such material had been sent to Captain Dansey in June of last year. We knew this was a lie because Dansey had meticulously listed every item he'd received from C and there'd been no record of any Dutch code-groups.

Nick said with a hint of sadness that it would be pointless to press Gambier-Parry further—the reply would be the same.

He and the ladies then went home early, presumably to their separate destinations, and I stared round the empty office like a small boy on detention who's forgotten his offence. There were no indecipherables to break, no agents to brief, no coders to interview, and Nick's records were locked up. My only company was Giskes, and I could no longer bear his smirk.

I hurried upstairs to give the WOK-makers their cream-cake tea, and spent ten minutes trying to relieve their monotony, which probably made it worse.

I then had to cope with my own, and faced the shock discovery that I was stale.

I hadn't taken a day off since June '42, and wanted to escape from escape routes, blown agents and everything to do with SOE for the rest of the afternoon.

The nearest bolt-hole was a flat in Park West to which daytime visitors were always welcome, but Major O'Reilly's flat was in the same corridor, far too close for the peace of mind essential to that particular comfort.

A film perhaps? If it didn't deal with the war. Fred Astaire and his other foot. Ginger Rogers, were doing their nimble best to Follow the Fleet at the local cinema. But it wouldn't be much of a respite to hear:

We joined the Navy
To C the world
And what did we C?
We saw the C.

Besides, two agents in training were using Irving Berlin's lyrics for their poem-codes and we probably owed him royalties.

I knew all the time that I was going to the only haven which had never failed me in times of distress, where the answers to everything were to be found if one knew where to look for them, and where agnostics like me could safely say their silent prayers…

84 Charing Cross Road.

'Giving a small boy the unsupervised run of a rare bookshop can put the future of both at risk. In my case, it also jeopardised SOE's.'