Between Silk and Cyanide (40 page)

On 16 April de Gaulle recalled Passy, Brossolette and Tommy from France. They were picked up by Lysander close to midnight, and resumed their duties in London early next morning.

I checked that Tommy's cigar lay in state next to the photo of the Louis-Schmeling fight which Rabinovitch had given me. They were still the only objects in my desk I could be sure of finding.

On 18 April Kale's first report on the Dutch Secret Army was transmitted by Cucumber. It was perfectly encoded in Cucumber's reserve poem number 3 and gave a detailed analysis of the progress being made in the sixteen provinces where the main recruitment was taking place.

On 21 April Netball, Gherkin and Lacrosse were dropped into Holland with twenty-eight containers and seven packages.

On 22 April Ebenezer confirmed Lacrosse's safe arrival. He added that more supply operations would be very welcome in the near future and that eight tommy-guns should be included. He also needed a large quantity of abrasives (my comments on supplying them were open to offer).

On the same night Cucumber reported the safe arrival of Netball and Gherkin, and asked when the next shipment of containers could be expected. Compliant as ever, London assured him that dropping operations would continue until the end of the moon period on 25 April but would be cancelled during the dark period and resumed when the new moon started on 9 May.

Later the same day (23 April) London assured Ebenezer that six containers would be dispatched to him in the next moon period but warned him that the address in Switzerland used by Potato for his innocent letters was no longer safe.
[20]

April's biggest shock (if not the war's) came on 24 April, and although I'd been taught by Father that anyone who complained that the bottom had dropped out of his world was an arse-hole, I joined that distinguished company.

I was informed by the supervisor at 53b that Cucumber had transmitted an indecipherable from Kale, and that all routine attempts to break it had failed. The code-groups were being teleprinted to London. I immediately contacted the signalmaster, who assured me that atmospheric conditions had been excellent, that Cucumber's operating had been flawless, and that there was no question of Morse mutilation.

This negated every theory I had about the Germans double-checking Dutch agents' coding.

Lacking the self-confidence to give up a conviction, I decided that only two inferences could be drawn from this unique indecipherable. Either Kale had made a mistake in his coding, which meant that he free. Or Giskes had produced another masterstroke!

Perhaps he had broken my deliberate indecipherable, and was repaying me in kind.

I prayed in Hebrew and in Latin that this wasn't the case because God only knew what he'd think up next. I was still praying when Muriel put the code-groups in front of me.

Despite Nick's perceptive advice to 'treat Kale's indecipherable like any other' I was unable to respond to it with the necessary detachment. But after wasting ten minutes searching for new approaches, I realized that speculation about Giskes would hold up the breaking, and that I must proceed on the assumption that Kale was free.

The most important question was whether he'd encoded the message himself or allowed his WT operator (Cucumber) to do it for him. It was a hard one to resolve because, despite strict orders to the contrary, organizers often handed their codes to their WT operators and asked them to encode their messages for them; Kale might not regard this as much of an infringement as he was using one of Cucumber's poems.

I referred to the notes I'd made on their respective briefings. Kale's had taken place on 18 September '42, and he'd been dropped into Holland on the 24th (my birthday, since no essential information should be withheld). Cucumber's had taken place on 25 October, and he'd been dropped on the 27th. Both had an excellent grasp of double-transposition, but agents tended to put on special performances at their final briefings, if only to get rid of me, and it was essential to see what kind of mistakes they'd made at their training schools.

Muriel produced their training files without having to be asked. Kale had encoded four indecipherables in fifteen messages, all due to misnumbered key-phrases. Cucumber had encoded twelve indecipherables in thirty messages—six due to 'hatted' columns, five to misnumbered key-phrases, and one to a misspelt word in his poem.

If Kale had done his own encoding, we'd concentrate on misnumbered phrases. If Cucumber had done it for him, we'd have to broaden attack.

I decided that commanders of Secret Armies were occasionally known to set good examples and that Kale had encoded the message himself.

1,500 attempts later there was no sign of a misnumbered keyphrases. I instructed the girls to try another 1,000, and tackled 100 myself. None of them succeeded, and the message's 300 letters began feel like 3,000.

Staring at the code-groups, I suddenly realized that there was an important factor which I'd completely overlooked.

This was only the second time that Kale had used Cucumber's poem and its unfamiliarity might have caused him to misspell a word. The poem was in Dutch, and I'd need someone to advise me on common misspellings.

I tried to contact Bingham and Killick but was told that they were on their way to a training school, and left a message for them to ring as soon as they could.

I then enquired if there was anyone in the Signals directorate who even a smattering of the language.

A coder admitted that she'd spent a week in Amsterdam and knew the Dutch for 'kiss my arse', and a signalmaster had been able to order Dutch cap in The Hague, but that was the limit of their fluency. I was wondering whether to contact the Dutch government-in-exile when rescue arrived from a source far closer to home.

The menaces who shared the office with me (Charlotte Denman and Molly Brewis) knew that I was in dire straits and hadn't once interrupted me. Then, without any warning, Molly Menace cleared her throat and blushed like a schoolgirl admitting her first crush. 'I have a word or two of Dutch,' she said.

The three of us occasionally surprised each other (a major asset to involuntary intimacy), and I thanked her for the best news of the day. I waited until the great frame was seated beside me, and explained that agents not only misspelled the words of their poems but frequently replaced them with similar-sounding words ('piece' for 'peace', 'mite' 'might', 'soul' for 'sole'). Hoping to promote some rivalry, I added that Vera Atkins of F section excelled at suggesting similar-sounding words, and had helped us with many a French indecipherable (some of them Duke Street's, though I hadn't admitted it).

'Oh God,' she exclaimed. 'I'm awful at guessing games.' And then proceeded to prove it.

Her first dozen guesses produced gibberish, and she tried a dozen more, watching anxiously while I tested them.

To make her feel part of the operation, I explained that the charts I was using showed how the first line of the message would be read if her guesses were correct. But unfortunately none of them were. By now she was beginning to enjoy it, and made another twenty suggestions. Twenty more fiascos.

Unaccustomed to being a silent spectator, Mrs Denman announced that she'd like to ask a question.

'Please do,' I said, hoping she wanted to know when Molly could return to her desk.

'Do you still think that the message was either encoded by a German or checked by one before it was transmitted?' It was my first intimation that Nick had told her of my suspicions.

'Yes—what of it?' was my courteous response.

'Then shouldn't you be trying to misspell the poem as a German might instead of a Dutchman?'

The idea hadn't even occurred to me.

'Will you marry me. Charlotte?—and we'll adopt Molly?'

A team by now, we held a brief conference and agreed that the obvious solution was to consult X section (the German directorate), though there was so much secrecy about anything to do with the Dutch that we mightn't be allowed to approach them.

Charlotte suggested that by the time we got official permission we could have learned the language ourselves.

Blushing again, Molly admitted that she spoke a word or two of German.

Our adopted daughter then went into action.

Her first dozen suggestions produced nothing but Kauderwelsch, which according to her was the German for gibberish.

Her next dozen produced more of the same but, encouraged by Charlotte, she Kauderwelsched on.

I decided by now that it would be quicker if I tried to anagram message out using Kale's first message for probable content. I was pondering how to break the news without hurting everyone's feeling's when they came to the next word of the poem: 'Trijs'.

'I suppose it would be "preis" in German,' said Molly, without conviction.

'No doubt of it,' said Charlotte, 'no doubt at all.'

Having no faith in it whatsoever, I substituted 'Preis' for 'Prijs' and numbered the transposition-key accordingly, making two mistakes in the process.

'Couldn't Molly help?' enquired Charlotte. 'She's good at maths too.'

Glad that one of us was, I numbered the phrase correctly, and then applied the charts, warning them that there was very little chance of clear-text emerging.

The letters UTR appeared, followed by ECHT…

'Utrecht' yelled the ladies in case I missed it.

Ten minutes later Kale's second report on the Secret Army was ready for distribution. Nick, N section and Gubbins were notified, and I told the coders at 53b that their colleagues in London had broken it to make them feel less excluded.

Bingham telephoned and instructed me to read the message to him over the scrambler. He rang off without comment the moment I'd finished.

Some people', said Charlotte, 'know the Preis of everything and value of nothing.'

An hour later I learned that I was one of them.

Nick called in to offer his congratulations, and I asked if Charlotte and Molly could be transferred to the code department.

The three of them then had a personal conversation which they made no attempt to conduct in undertones—an event without precedent. It concerned two of their friends who'd been married for fifty years without being separated for more than a day. The wife had died recently, and although her husband had nothing physically wrong with him, he took to his bed and willed himself to follow her. Two days ago he had succeeded, and tomorrow they were to be burried side by side.

I wondered how it must feel to be buried next to one's other half for ever, bombs and property developers permitting:

It will feel strange
Not to nudge you
Or to talk to you
Or keep you warm
When you're lying there
Only a few feet away
Or perhaps even less
But we shall get used to it in time
Of which we'll have plenty
We always treasured silences
In which we said everything
We shall continue to treasure them
And to say everything
Throughout the longest silence of all.

It had no place in the ditty-box but I'd found that occasional dollops of sentiment cleared my head for facts, and there were three which I had to live with:

1 I was never going to convince SOE of the extent of Giskes'; penetration.

2 I was too close to the corpse of Kale's indecipherable to conduc a proper autopsy.

3 My talent as a cryptographer was the longest silence of all.

It was rare for anyone outside the Signals directorate to show the slightest interest in how indecipherables were broken, but when I least welcomed it Gubbins and Bingham displayed too much.

The general required a full report on the significance (if any) of 'Prijs'/'Preis', and Bingham wanted to know if we'd made the mistake ourselves.

After a cooling-off period of one morning (a millennium by SOE's standards) I returned to 'Prijs'/'Preis', and rapidly decided that Giskes hadn't sent London a deliberate indecipherable. If he'd wanted to return the compliment, he'd have taken at least as much trouble as I had, and wouldn't have used a Germanicized misspelling. But this didn't mean that Kale wasn't caught.

It was unlikely that Giskes would undertake the manual labour of double-transposition in addition to his own creative writing, and a negligent subordinate might have encoded the message, or failed to check Kale's encoding if he'd been permitted to do it himself. Perhaps the Germans had their off moments too.

I said as much in my report to Nick, emphasizing that 'the hitherto the encoding of all Dutch agents despite the circumstances in which 'they operated' must surely lead to only one conclusion: that all of them had been caught on landing, or shortly afterwards.

I was instructed by return to keep a 'special watch' on Kale's future traffic.

His next batch of messages were perfectly encoded, and on 29 April he sent his final Secret Army report. He ended by stressing that if the battle to liberate Holland didn't take place soon even his most resolute supporters would be influenced by German propaganda (vintage Giskes?).

The traffic of Ebenezer, Heck, Hockey and Co. was equally disturbing as they'd never been more active in the Allied cause. Between the lot of them, they were going to evacuate Broadbean to Paris locate the headquarters of the 65th Marine Infantry division, and verify a report that the Germans were preparing to re-inundate the old Dutch water defences in case of invasion.

I wondered how much longer Giskes could keep it up.

At the beginning of May the Executive Council made an announcement which was so long overdue that all but agnostics had given up praying for it. The symbols list proclaimed that Colonel F. W. Nicholls had replaced Colonel G. D. Ozanne as director of Signals.

Heffer, who'd been lobbying for months to bring this about, confided that Ozanne had been sent on leave prior to being outposted on 1 June, and had been allowed a few hours' grace in which to clear out his belongings. SOE had no use for empty bottles.