Between Silk and Cyanide (66 page)

I was the last to be called upon as it was believed that all was well with the code department. Unfortunately it wasn't.

I'd realized, hopefully in time, that there were major flaws in our contribution to Overlord, and was obliged to tell my colleagues that now had to discuss two problems which not only affected our D-Day traffic but could have repercussions far beyond it.

I was convinced that unless we took immediate precautions, the huge increase in our French traffic between now and D-Day couldn't fail to alert the enemy that we were organizing mass uprisings all over France, and might even blow the imminence of Overlord. My second worry was the use of BBC messages to agents in the field.

Taking first things first, if only for the novelty, I suggested that one way to disguise the growth of our traffic would be to start flooding the air with dummy messages which would be transmitted round the clock to every part of Europe. Each message would be encoded in a WOK, LOP or poem, and would be indistinguishable from our genuine traffic.

This minor undertaking was enthusiastically received, and Heffer allowed me forty-eight hours in which to present him with the details. I then disclosed at length why I believed that the BBC's
en clair
messages to agents had become a major security risk (responsibility for vetting them was vested in our liaison officer with the BBC).

They agreed that my misgivings were thoroughly justified, and that a solution must be found as soon as possible.

Since I was the one who'd raised the problem, Heffer allowed me the same forty-eight hours in which to solve it, and I asked if I could be excused from the rest of the meeting (it seemed likely to last until well after D-Day).

Someone whispered, 'Lucky sod' as I hurried from the room.

But then he didn't know the extent of the problem I'd just talked myself into.

The idea of BBC announcers reading short
en clair
messages to agents in the field had been conceived in 1941 by George Begue, the first SOE agent to be parachuted into France.

Begue (who'd escaped from a Vichy prison in '42 and was now Captain Noble of F section) had been given a poem-code and an elementary WT set, and dropped into the Chateau-roux area to communicate with London. He'd soon discovered that the Germans were jamming his traffic, that their direction-finding vans were scouring the vicinity, and that he was risking his life every time he came on the air. He'd also realized that many of London's messages consisted of instructions to carry out orders he'd already been given. Anxious not to use his set if he could possibly avoid it, he'd suggested to London that their last-minute instructions to him could safely be conveyed in short prearranged phrases, whose meaning only he and F section would know. If London agreed, he would listen every night to the BBC's foreign service until these phrases were broadcast.

His concept of 'personal messages' was at once adopted, and rapidly spread to every country section in SOE. Since then, short plain-language messages had become an integral part of agents' communications, and were currently being used to confirm safe-houses, passwords and dropping operations, substantially reducing an operator's airtime.

They also fulfilled a function which Noble hadn't foreseen. They enabled agents in the field to say to those whose help they badly needed but who doubted their bona fides, 'Make up a short message—it doesn't matter what—and I'll arrange for it to be broadcast a week from now on the BBC's foreign service.' The results of this offer never failed to produce the desired effects, and often enabled agents to borrow large sums of money on the lender's assumption (not always well founded) that London would repay the advance when the war was over.

These all-important phrases had been christened 'iodoforms' by someone in Baker Street with a classical education, though it was hard to guess his identity.

A typical iodoform was 'Je ne regrette rien', and a typical Signals problem was that the agent it was intended for had to be aware of its significance; the only way London could convey it to him was through WT messages which he'd then have to acknowledge.

There was no danger in this if WOKs and LOPs had been used, but if the details were transmitted to him in a poem-code (as so many iodoforms were) the agent was likely to have beaucoup to regret. If the enemy had broken his poem, they'd know the meaning of his 'personal messages' and be in a position to take appropriate action.

And there was another danger: even if they hadn't broken his code, if they scoured his traffic for the words of iodoforms they suspected were his, their anagrammers would have a field-day, and the life of the poem would soon be over. And the agent's with it.

But an even greater nightmare was rapidly taking shape.

I'd been told by Nick that shortly before D-Day SOE intended to use iodoforms to instruct Secret Armies and agents that it was time to break cover and cause maximum havoc in every way they could.

I'd been too preoccupied with recruitment problems to point out that a) even on D-Day dozens of agents would still be using poem-codes, either because we'd failed to deliver silks to them or because they'd mislaid them, and that b) if the D-Day iodoforms had been prearranged in broken poems, the enemy would not only know that Overlord was imminent, they might be able to pinpoint where the landings would take place.

I didn't need forty-eight hours to decide what had to be done. But I wondered what else we experts had missed.

Seated at Nick's desk as if he were there for the duration, the Guru began the most important conversation we were ever likely to have by instructing me to present my ideas as succinctly as possible as he had to leave the office early.

Trying to sound casual, I said that the code department's contribution to concealing the spiralling volume of our traffic would be to supply the stations with 10,000 dummy code-groups a week for transmission round the clock to all parts of Europe. I then reminded him (not because he needed to be reminded but because I liked saying it) that each message would be encoded in a "WOK, LOP or poem, and would be indistinguishable from our genuine traffic, and stressed that the sooner these dummy transmissions started the better.

The Guru expressed concern about the extra work dummy traffic would cause coders and WT operators.

I replied that I couldn't answer for the WT operators but I could for the coders and pointed out that to simulate LOP-traffic, the girls had only to copy out the code-groups of a one-time pad, and hand them over for transmission.

But I conceded that simulating WOK and poem-code traffic would be a very different matter: all such messages were the product of double-transposition, and if their code-groups didn't contain the correct proportion of vowels and consonants they'd be recognized as counterfeit. Since we couldn't devise the texts ourselves, we'd have to rely on the country sections to compose large numbers of dummy messages as if they were genuine, but I doubted if they'd agree to this request without considerable pressure.

The Guru expressed his gratification at the prospect of applying it, and undertook to call a meeting of the country section heads to explain what was required of them.

Glancing at his watch, he announced with a sigh that it was time we dealt with iodoforms. He agreed that it was impossible to dispense with them, and was relieved when I admitted that the only suggestion I could make about concealing their growth was to introduce dummy iodoforms immediately.

I added that even though the BBC surrounded our iodoforms with other 'personal messages' (some genuine, the rest dummy), there weren't nearly enough of them, and their quantity must be doubled, though it would mean asking for extra airtime.

He immediately undertook to contact Major Buxton (our liaison officer with the BBC) to ensure that we got it. He then glanced at his overflowing in-tray, and silently conveyed that the meeting was over.

But I had bad news for him. 'There's just one more problem…'

'There always is with you. Well? What is it?'

'A lot of the dummy traffic would have to be Free French.'

'Well? What of it?'

'Valois may not like the idea of dummy messages, and his word is law in Duke Street—just as yours is with us. What can we do if he won't cooperate?'

'I shall leave Valois to you,' he announced magnanimously.

He had just enough energy to point to the door.

Passy, Manuel and Valois were all convinced of Valois's brilliance, and for once I agreed with them completely.

The French wizard and I had had no further disputes since he'd stopped needing secret code prefixes, though he still believed that the outcome of the Signals war depended on radios and signal-plans, with codes bringing up the rear, preferably someone else's. It would be the first time we'd met without Kay Moore having to act as our interpreter (his English was on a par with my French) but I knew that if we didn't speak the same language now we never would.

He rose from behind a desk even more cluttered than mine, and I had no difficulty in understanding his opening remark. 'Ah, Tommee.' he said, and shook his head sadly.

I accepted a cup of his atrocious coffee, and thanked him for seeing me at such short notice but we had a 'tres important problem que the deux of us must discutez'.

He appeared to get the drift of this. 'Probleme, Monsieur Marks? Quel probleme? What is it?'

I expounded 'Le probleme de our growing traffic et le need pour dummy messages' as succinctly as I could, but five minutes later caught him looking at me in such total bewilderment that I was about to telephone Kay Moore for assistance when something in his eyes stopped me.

Shaking his head as if to remove the droppings of my pigeon-French, he explained in Valois-English that he'd been thinking of telephoning me to suggest dummy traffic but wasn't sure how I'd respond.

I accepted another cup of coffee because it was suddenly delicious, and we spent the next hour discussing 'Ie probleme', which we approached from completely different viewpoints.

Many of his ideas for misleading the enemy, such as using variable frequencies at irregular intervals with identical call-signs, were completely beyond me, and mine for making some messages look easy to break meant little to him. But one thing was clear to both of us: we were speaking the same language. We were both convinced that the dummy traffic should start as soon as possible, and he promised that his Duke Street colleagues would provide suitable texts.

I didn't know the French for 'keep stumm' but had no difficulty in convincing him that the less we said to our respective chiefs about our little tricks the better. He also agreed that to facilitate our phonecalls we should give the dummy traffic a code-name only he and I would know. I tried to persuade him to choose one but he insisted on leaving the code-name to me.

I remembered his opening remark. 'How about calling it "R. Tommee"?' I suggested. It was unanimously adopted.

On 26 March we learned that Tommy had been transferred to Fresnes prison.

Perhaps it was coincidence, but later that night we transmitted our first batch of 'R. Tommee' messages.

One of the most novel experiences in SOE was to receive a phone call from a country section head admitting he was wrong, but Maurice Buckmaster phoned on 23 March and apologized to me for 'making another gaffe'.

He admitted that he'd mistakenly believed that one of his trainee agents, who'd been taught codes at training school, would have no use for them whatever when she reached the field, and he'd excluded her from the list of agents due for refresher courses in London. Her code-name was Louise, and she was to have been dropped into France in mid-march with Maurice Southgate to act as his courier, but their drop had been postponed until April because of the weather.

He and Southgate had since decided it might be useful if Louise could use encoded messages in an emergency. Could she possibly be given a refresher course immediately, and would I give her a final code-briefing as soon as I could?

I agreed to send an instructress to Orchard Court within the next ten minutes, and to give Louise a final briefing later in the week. He phoned again the next morning to thank me for the instructress, and to say he'd made another mistake. Louise might not be in London for more than a couple of days. Could I possibly give her a final briefing at once?

Although I was used to briefing his women agents (they included Noor, Odette and an Australian boomerang named Nancy Wake), I was still uneasy in their presence and needed adequate warning to practise growing-up, but Maurice pressed me for an answer and I reluctantly agreed to see Louise in an hour.

I then remembered that most women agents seemed slightly more approachable when I addressed them by their real names, and I asked him what hers was.

'Violette Szabo,' he said, and hung up to take another call.

According to her instructress's report, Violette had no problems with her WOK but was careless with her poem-code, and seemed unable to number her transposition keys without making mistakes. More practice was recommended.

I stood outside Orchard Court for ten minutes to sharpen my inner ear and convince myself that the code war's only problem was helping Louise, then opened the door of the briefing room.

A dark-haired slip of mischief rose from behind a desk which Noor had once occupied, held out her hand, and smiled.

It seemed inappropriate for the head of Codes to mark the occasion by singing 'Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise', so I shook her hand in silence.
[34]

Resuming her seat, she picked up a WOK which was lying in front of her and declared the proceedings open. 'I like this code,' she said, 'but Colonel Buckmaster thinks it won't be safe for me to carry it. I had such a good place to hide it, too.' She had a cockney accent, which added to her impishness.

Professor Higgins instructed Eliza Doolittle to encode a WOK message at least 200 letters long.