Between Silk and Cyanide (71 page)

The SAS rarely sought help from other organizations; they preferred to be left alone 'to do things their way' (an attitude which only the enemy had cause to regret), but they'd allowed me to brief a group of their instructors and to meet some of their troops. They regarded the invasion as a night out on the town, especially if it were in enemy hands. Two thousand of them were now standing by to cause their special brand of havoc, and three advance parties had been dropped behind enemy lines to demolish fortifications and link up with the Resistance. The Jedburghs were also in action, but wouldn't be for long if their luck didn't change. The three-man teams had made a disastrous start. Quinine and Ammonia (some humorist in authority had decided to code-name Jedburghs after patent medicines) were the first teams to be launched from Algiers. They set off for France on 5 June, but missed D-Day altogether as their pilots couldn't find the dropping grounds and had to return to base. The ops. were remounted; Quinine and Veganin were landed on the 9th and Ammonia on the 10th. But one member of the Veganin team was killed whilst jumping as he hadn't hooked up the static line of his parachute, which so upset his team-leader that he had to be withdrawn from the field. Half the Quinine and Ammonia teams were also out of action due to appalling stomach cramps, diarrhoea and raging fever, maladies which were reported to London in the Lord's Prayer as the WT operator had mislaid his silk codes. (He'd used 'Hallowed be Thy name' as his key-phrase but spelt 'hallowed' with three Ts, and it took 4,000 attempts to decipher his message.)

By 11 June fever of another kind (no less insidious because it was psychological) had infected the Jedburghs at Milton Hall who'd been waiting for weeks (and in some instances, months) to go into action. They'd been promised a key role on D-Day, and were angry at their exclusion. They were even angrier that they still hadn't been given a firm departure date, and according to their coding instructress had lost confidence in their briefing officers, felt neglected and deceived, and were in a state of near mutiny.

Choosing her words carefully, which was rare amongst FANY sergeants, she advised me to stay away from Milton Hall. I'd arranged with Colonel Musgrove (the station's CO) to go there on the 14th but he phoned me on the llth and urged me not to come as the last two lecturers had been given a 'very rough reception' and had had to leave the platform in a hurry. He added that the Jedburghs 'knew their bloody codes backwards' as he'd made them practise them for hours 'to help pass the time', and I'd no need to brief them: 'Marks, I must say this to you frankly. The last thing they want is another lecture, least of all on codes, and if you insist on coming down here I shan't be answerable for the consequences.'

He clearly feared that a know-it-all civilian of unmistakably Semitic origin would start a riot of unquantifiable proportions. Nick and Heffer also urged me to stay away as the timing was wrong. But it wasn't for me.

I hadn't faced a lynch-mob since admitting to the Free French that I'd broken de Gaulle's secret code, and badly needed the illusion of courage. I also wanted to inspect Milton Hall's library, most of which had come from 84.

I decided to arrive on the 14th wearing a bullet-proof vest, and returned to the lesser heroics of the invasion.

The traffic made clear that the extent of SOE's contribution to Overlord had come to the attention of the British as well as the Germans. Although the High Command still had reservations about the Resistance Movement's staying-power and SOE's competence, SHAEF headquarters in France sent a telegram to Gubbins confirming that the landings in Normandy and Brittany owed much of their success to the widespread uprisings, and even more to the number of troop-carrying trains derailed and sabotaged by the Pimento organization.

This remarkable group consisted entirely of railway workers, and was controlled by an express-train of an agent named Tony Brooks (code name Alphonse), who'd been dropped into France in June '42 when he was a locomotive of twenty—the youngest agent Buckmaster had yet dispatched to the field.

Knowing little about trains but a great deal about passengers, he spent the next two years preparing Pimento for D-Day, and his efforts achieved the historic result of surpassing Buckmaster's expectations. Since receiving their first 'Action' messages, Pimento had derailed over 1,000 trains, and the crack Das Reich division, which had been ordered to rush to Normandy to repel the invasion, was forced to travel by road, giving the Allies the time they needed to consolidate their beachheads. Pimento had also paralysed scores of railway yards, brought all the traffic in the Rhone valley to a standstill, and ensured that every train leaving Marseilles for Lyons was derailed at least once in the course of its journey. Of the dozens of messages reporting Pimento's progress, only three had themselves been derailed, but the mishaps had been caused by Morse mutilation and not by mistakes in coding. Pimentos were Mother's favourite vegetable.

On 11 June her favourite only child began preparing his address to the Milton Hall mutineers so that it would sound spontaneous in three days' time but I was unable to get beyond my opening sentence ('Listen, you bastards, if you can remember how to') as I couldn't stop brooding about the Polish government-in-exile.

An important Polish operation, code-named Bardsea, which was supposed to have taken place on D-Day, had been abandoned because of political in-fighting amongst the Polish authorities, an art at which they had no equal.

SOE's relationship with the Polish government-in-exile was as hard to understand as a mental one-time pad. Its complexity not only caused problems for everyone but the enemy, it made reality fight for its life. SOE's Polish directorate (known as MP) was run by Colonel Perkins, and was responsible for recruiting Polish expatriates, turning them into agents, and dropping them into France and Poland to work for SOE. But the Polish government-in-exile also recruited expatriates, though in far larger numbers, and dispatched them to the same territories, usually on missions of which we knew nothing.

Foreseeing most of this and realizing that some semblance of coordination would be helpful, Gubbins had a conference in 1940 with General Sikorski (the Polish prime minister whom SOE had smuggled into England), and agreed to create a special department in the Polish directorate known as EU/P.

As I understood it, EU/P's function was to liaise with the Polish authorities to prepare Bardsea for D-Day, to ensure that their operations into France weren't duplicated, and to start a free exchange of information. The ministries agreed to the arrangement, and honoured it whenever it suited them. The head of EU/P was Major Hazell, who'd been doing the job since 1941 but had little to show for it except premature old age and the prospect of monitoring Bardsea after spending three years discussing it. His unofficial remit was to find out as much as he could about the government-in-exile's independent operations. But the Polish authorities found a use for Hazell which SOE hadn't foreseen.

By D-Day the Polish Ministry of the Interior and their Ministry of National Defence were no longer on speaking terms, and insisted on using Hazell's EU/P section as their sole means of communication, which may not have helped the war effort but guaranteed him full employment.

Bardsea's traffic did as much for me. The Polish agents were to use LOPs and WOKs for their messages, which they'd been instructed to keep to a minimum (a near guarantee that they wouldn't). But it wasn't the agents' traffic which was taking up so much brooding-time. It was the government-in-exile's.

Despite a recent Foreign Office ruling that until further notice all governments-in-exile must pass the whole of their traffic (including diplomatic) in British, American or Russian ciphers, the Polish government-in-exile was still allowed to use its own codes. I'd no idea what they were, and Nick warned me that under no circumstances must I attempt to find out as they were none of SOE's business: 'The decision's been taken at the highest level. Don't even think of questioning it.'

I wasn't able to stop. Nick may have forgotten (his memory had become an Overlord casualty) that on the eve of Tiltman-the-Great's visit to Baker Street he'd told me that both Bletchley and the Germans had been reading Russian codes for years, and that it was only when the Germans declared war on the Soviet Union that the Foreign Office warned the Russians to change them immediately. I found this aspect of the code war completely indecipherable as it must have cost tens of thousands of Russian lives.

It seemed certain that the Polish authorities in London would want to report Bardsea's progress to their ministries abroad, which would cause unquantifiable damage if the codes weren't high-grade. Had the Foreign Office vetted them? It was such an obvious precaution that it couldn't be taken for granted. And why had the Poles been made an exception to the rule? Above all, had the Foreign Office been properly briefed about Bardsea?

Its importance had begun filtering through to the Signals directorate.

It was to be a joint operation: the Poles were to supply the agents; SOE was to drop them. Its purpose was to land 100 highly trained agents near Lille, where they'd link up with the half million Polish expatriates who lived and worked in the area. Amongst their other Resistance activities, these expatriates had formed a Secret Army called Monica.

SOE had been told little about Monica apart from its code-name, but in February Chalmers-Wright (a former member of the Political Warfare Executive) had crossed the Pyrenees on a tour of inspection, and strolled back two months later by the same route to report to Perkins and Hazell that, if Monica could be supplied with arms and explosives and given the proper targets, it could mount and maintain a major uprising and would have an enormous D-Day potential.

Without disclosing what he knew, Hazell tried to persuade the Poles to clarify Monica's role on D-Day while there was still time to exploit its potential, but they were reluctant to discuss Monica's activities, and all EU/P section had so far discovered was that Bardsea agents were to be dropped to Monica's reception committees. End of brood, and the start of my efforts to find out what I could about the government-in-exile's codes.

I manufactured an excuse to visit Hazell, and casually mentioned that it would be a pity if the Germans learned about Monica through the government-in-exile's traffic, and he equally casually mentioned to their chief signals officer that SOE had a good line in codes. The signals officer replied that he was familiar with our systems and thought they were excellent, but perhaps we'd come up with some new ones he hadn't been shown, in which case he'd be glad if Hazell could produce a few specimens.

I invited him to my office, and gave him freedom of the walls after removing the Free French and SAS code-books (I left the Jedburgh code-books intact as the Poles were aware of their activities). It may have been Mother's sandwiches, Muriel's red hair, or the effect of the lighting, but just when I was wondering how to introduce the subject of the code which mattered most to me he asked if we could possibly supply him with 200 LOPs immediately as he needed them 'for a most important purpose'.

Although we couldn't afford to part with them, I promised that they'd be delivered to his office within the next two hours, hoping that the government-in-exile would start using them at once. He then asked if I'd like to accompany him to meet the 100 Bardsea agents in training. I was due to visit them anyway, but accepted his invitation. Two days later, he turned up at the wheel of a jeep, and I soon learned how Chalmers-Wright felt crossing the Pyrenees. A few mountain peaks later he thanked me for the LOPs, then immediately began discussing the route, so I still don't know what their 'urgent purpose' was. Our dropping zone was a holding school near Horsham, where the Bardsea agents had been incarcerated for months, waiting for D-Day.

Reluctant to surrender the driving seat to me, the signals officer insisted on acting as interpreter.

They understood their LOPs perfectly but had to struggle a bit with their WOKs, and I sensed from the extra weight in their eyes that the Bardseas had been taught to use other codes about which we knew nothing. Although some of them had almost certainly taken part in the national sport of confining Polish Jews to ghettos, they were a magnificent bunch, highly trained, counting the seconds to go, and excellent pupils. Mass briefings like this were usually two-way traffic pogroms, but the Bardseas has a special quality, and several hours later I felt almost ready to drop with them to Monica. On D-Day the entire Bardsea operation was cancelled due to another bout of in-fighting. None of us doubted the Poles' courage, or their determination to attack the common enemy, or how much the Allies owed to General Sikorski's leadership (he'd died in '43). But what a fuck-up. What a waste of 100 first-class agents, of Monica's potential, of LOPs we couldn't spare.

Hazell asked if they could be returned to us but the signals officer replied that the Poles 'would find very good use for them'. Knowing their macabre sense of humour, I didn't ask what it was. On the morning of the 12th I learned that Violette Szabo had been captured by the Germans.

She'd been dropped back into France on the 7th with Staunton to re-establish his Salesman circuit, but three days later she and one of his assistants (Anastasie) were trying to reach Limoges by car when they were spotted by an advance party of the Das Reich division. She held up the Germans with her sten-gun for as long as she could to give Anastasie the chance to escape and complete his mission but was caught when her ammunition ran out.

I hadn't seen her since she'd returned by Lysander in April as her coding instructress had told me that all Violette needed was a new WOK. She hadn't yet used her poem, and was anxious not to change it.

Since I couldn't justify a visit, I'd sent her a note saying that I hadn't lost a single game of chess with the set that she'd given me, which was true as I hadn't yet used it.

She sent a note back promising if she had to use her poem she wouldn't make a single spelling mistake.