Between Silk and Cyanide Read online

  Hoping to be out if he did, I picked up my NDO’s satchel and assumed command of my forces. ‘Right, Corporal! Lead the way.’

  He looked at me in bewilderment.

  ‘What way, sir?’

  ‘What do you mean “What way, sir”? Where do we start?’

  ‘No idea, sir. I’ve never done this before, sir.’

  I nearly fell over his Sten gun, if that’s what it was, and requested an explanation.

  ‘I’m standing in for the sergeant, sir. He’s hurt his foot, sir.’

  ‘But surely he gave you some instructions.’

  ‘Yes, sir. He said I’m here to protect you, sir. And you’d tell me what to do, sir.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Quick march then.’

  The plumber and his mate went walkabout in Michael House. I knew nothing about the geography of the place and very little about its natives. The third floor, I believed, was where merchant bankers in profusion practised their daily diabolicals and I suspected that members of the Executive Council weren’t far away. I knew that amongst the giants who had offices in my building were CD himself, his deputy, Brigadier Gubbins, and his other right hand, Colonel Sporborg – who was principal private secretary to SOE’s minister, Lord Selborne, on all matters concerned with SOE. It was rumoured that between these two right hands CD could afford the luxury of knowing what his left was doing.

  I decided to start the paperchase in the one office I did know and halted the patrol outside the door of the narcissistic captain who’d tried to brief me. There was no light on inside. ‘Corporal, if I’m not out in five minutes, come in shooting.’

  Something clicked behind me. I couldn’t get inside fast enough. (Official procedure, subsequently discovered, was for the armed escort to go in first, search behind the curtains and anywhere else intruders might be lurking, and for the NDO then to enter.)

  The captain’s office had more scraps of paper in it than a royal park. I put them gleefully into my NDO satchel. I wouldn’t report him, but first thing in the morning I’d paper his ego. The rest of the security department’s offices were almost as insecure. One officer had left a blotter full of ink marks on his desk. I removed it and made a note to hold up a mirror to the culprit in the morning.

  The next six offices I went into were all empty and I wondered if it was early closing. One desk was full of rotten apples, a mirror image of its occupant? Another contained a personal letter which didn’t seem to be in code. (SOE used a code called Playfair for concealing secret messages in innocent letters. It was an innocent’s code and offered little more security than invisible ink when the right kind of heat was applied.)

  One door at the end of a small anteroom had a light on inside. Perhaps it had been left on by accident. I knocked.

  ‘Come.’

  A brigadier and a colonel with an eyepatch sat side by side at a desk. Gubbins and Sporborg. They glanced up from a document they were studying.

  I was tempted to say that I’d looked in for a chat about the poem-code. I announced myself instead. ‘Night duty officer. Is this room exempt from inspection, sir?’

  They stared at me. Gubbins’s eyes made de Gaulle’s seem placid. Sporborg saw more from his single orb than most people with two.

  Gubbins answered. ‘The whole floor is exempt.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Start from the top and work downwards.’

  The story of my career.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘The night duty officer, sir.’

  I had an instinct that I should withhold my name if I could get away with it. Gubbins gave Sporborg a look which said: ‘Is this what we’ve come down to?’ and Sporborg smiled. They returned to their document.

  The intelligence in that room was like a vibro-massage and an iota of their combined brainpower seemed to have infected my corporal. He stopped outside a door which I hadn’t even noticed and put his fingers to his lips. ‘There’s something funny going on in there, sir. Noise, but no lights.’

  I couldn’t hear a sound but didn’t want to discourage him and went inside.

  He was wrong about the lights. There was a candle burning on the desk and it flickered on to a pair of khaki trousers. But he was right about the sounds. They were coming from the far side of the room, where a major and his lady were locked together in what I believed to be position number 69 in the sexual code groups.

  ‘Just checking the confidential waste,’ I said, and left them to dispose of their own.

  I supposed I should report them for not locking the door. Was the danger of official discovery more exciting than the prospect of mutual? It was worthy of personal research.

  Five minutes later I lost my escort. I searched up and down the corridors but there wasn’t a corporal in sight. Two minutes later I lost myself. Like the major and his lady, I no longer knew what floor I was on. I found myself outside Gubbins’s office. I could hardly ask him the way to the NDO’s room.

  An antelope of a colonel named Dodds-Parker strode down the corridor and was kind enough to point me in the right direction – which turned out to be one of his specialities. He knocked on Gubbins’s door and went in. Dodds-Parker was deeply involved in Operation Torch. From the demands that he was making for Signals equipment and personnel, we knew that the invasion of Algiers was imminent.

  My long-lost corporal was waiting for me outside the NDO’s office. His complexion was the colour of his uniform. ‘Very sorry, sir. I was taken short.’

  I knew how he felt. I was born short. I thanked him for his help, but he continued standing there. I wondered if he’d been taken short again. ‘Dismiss?’ I suggested tentatively.

  He saluted, turned to go.

  ‘By the way, Corporal, what was wrong with your sergeant’s foot?’

  ‘He dropped his wife on it, sir.’

  ‘Give them my regards.’

  I went inside to face my night.

  For the first half an hour there was nothing much to face. Just a few routine calls which I did my best to answer. The atmosphere was as cheerful as an interview room in an underprivileged police station. I was doing my bit for the agents’ ditty-box when a special messenger brought in an envelope from the code department marked FOR CD PERSONALLY.

  I assumed it was my job to evaluate its contents and then telephone CD if I thought necessary. I opened it anyway. It contained a long situ-ation report FOR CD’S EYES ONLY from the head of SOE’s Cairo Station, Lord Glenconner. The sitrep dealt with the latest developments of Operation Bullseye, in which the Signals directorate had a vested interest.

  The purpose of Bullseye was to persuade Mihailovic to concentrate his Yugoslav guerrillas against the occupying German forces instead of trying to kill his rival, Tito, the leader of the Communist partisans. Like most of SOE’s Balkans operations, Bullseye consisted of myriad complex details amounting to a horrific simplicity.

  The mission had been entrusted to a resourceful, highly experienced SOE officer named Hudson who’d been put ashore by submarine on the coast of Montenegro in 1941 with three Yugoslavs, one of them a wireless operator. Julian Amery took time off from his duties in Belgrade to act as conducting officer and report that the mission had landed safely.

  Hudson’s first priority was to contact Mihailovic – which he eventually did – and set up wireless communications between Bullseye and London and Bullseye and Cairo. This proved even more difficult. The poem-code had spread its disease to the Balkans but instead of a poem the Reader’s Digest was used for Bullseye’s traffic, presumably because someone had paid his subscription. The first message received from Bullseye was indecipherable and remained so until it was discovered that Outstation and Home were using different editions of the Reader’s Digest. The mistake was remedied by Cairo – one of the few that were.

  Since SOE in London didn’t yet have a wireless station it was forced to rely on C’s to transmit and receive agents’ traffic (including Bull
seye’s). Unbeknown to Glenconner (and to everyone outside the Signals directorate), two enterprising signals officers named Wing Commander Pyle and Captain Ward decided to check on C’s efficiency, and they did so by erecting their own improvised monitoring station on the roof of Baker Street. They intercepted two Bullseye messages which C had missed. In a rare spasm of co-operation, C and SOE finally ensured that the right frequencies were used, the right equipment issued and the same code employed by Home Station and Out.

  Glenconner’s sitrep was concerned with SOE’s relationship with Tito, which was about as stable as mine with Ozanne. Glenconner was convinced that Tito was actively collaborating with the Germans to bring about the capture and execution of Mihailovic and the disbandment of his forces. He reminded CD of a previous sitrep he had sent and synopsised its astonishing contents:

  The Germans had captured a group of Mihailovic’s guerrillas with the help (Glenconner believed) of information provided by Tito. They had told the prisoners that they would all be shot unless they revealed where Mihailovic and his chief of staff were hiding. One prisoner jumped up and identified himself as Mihailovic, another jumped up and said he was his chief of staff. Both men were shot. Mihailovic and his chief of staff were hiding in the mountains.

  Like the master diplomat he was, Glenconner had an eye for a punchline, even in a sitrep. He stressed that General Donovan (the head of OSS) was extremely concerned about the SOE–Tito relationship and was prepared to meet CD in London to confirm that he totally endorsed Glenconner’s reservations about Tito.

  Anything of concern to the Americans was of even greater concern to SOE. OSS had still not decided whether to do the bulk of its growing European business with C or with us.

  Glenconner ended by urging CD to clarify SOE’s policies towards Mihailovic and Tito and asked for an immediate reply.

  I was reluctant to disturb CD in his bath but it occurred to me that he might still be prowling the building. And that Gubbins and Sporborg might still be in conference. And here was I, only a floor away from them, taking no advantage of it. Why didn’t I walk upstairs with my coding report and face the consequences?

  Because I hadn’t the guts.

  What would an ‘SOE-minded’ NDO do to get a document into CD’s hands as if by accident?

  Suddenly I knew.

  I went back to my office and did it.

  Not even SOE allowed NDOs to desert their sentry boxes without good reason. I phoned the Norgeby House NDO and asked if he would take all my calls for the next thirty minutes as an urgent indecipherable had just come in.

  ‘Have a drink on me,’ he said.

  I’d need one if my plan failed and several more if it succeeded. I christened it ‘Operation NDO’. It had one objective: to get my report into the hands of CD no later than tomorrow without my appearing to know that he had it. Since I was forbidden by Ozanne to show it to him, I would have to rely upon the security department to act as my special messenger.

  The first step in Operation NDO was to have my report read by the security department. I took a copy of it from its locked oasis and garnished it with a tomato-red label, a coloration reserved for highly sensitive documents.

  The next step was to ensure that the security department became aware that a major security offence had been committed in the night.

  I wrote in my NDO’s report that in the course of my patrol duties I had discovered a Top Secret document, the contents of which I had not perused, in an unlocked drawer of a desk normally occupied, so I understood upon enquiry, by Marks of Codes.

  My final act of self-immolation was to empty the NDO’s satchel of everyone else’s scraps of paper and put my code report in their place.

  Security took every opportunity to bring its efficiency to the attention of the All Highest and would make the most of an offence of this magnitude. Hopefully my report would be in CD’s hands the following day. Technically, I would not have shown it to him. The security department would be responsible, and if Ozanne attempted to use my gross carelessness as grounds for instant dismissal, it would be cheap at the price. Before leaving SOE I would ask CD one question: ‘If a report on agents’ codes was such a breach of security, how much greater a breach was the continued use of them?’

  There was one major flaw in Operation NDO: the security department might realise that the author of the report and the NDO who found it were one and the same person. But if they realised it after CD had read it, it would no longer matter.

  I took good care when signing the NDO’s report that my signature was as indecipherable as a Skinnarland message. Was there anything I had overlooked? What about the NDO who inspected the code department’s premises? He was the one who should discover that report on my desk.

  I realised that he would cause me no more problems than he usually did.

  I was he.

  The code department was always inspected by the Michael House NDO – and then most cursorily. We were the only department in SOE fully staffed at night and NDOs were never allowed to see the work in progress.

  There were probably plenty of flaws I hadn’t spotted but it was too late to worry about them. Operation NDO would be mounted in the morning, no matter what.

  I returned to the NDO’s cubbyhole. The corporal was dozing in a chair outside. I phoned my Norgeby House colleague.

  He told me there hadn’t been a single call for me. ‘Nothing’s happened in Michael House tonight,’ he said wistfully.

  But I suspected that a great deal was going to happen tomorrow – most of it to me.

  NINE

  The Godfather

  The morning after my NDO experience I found an envelope addressed to ‘Mr Marx’ waiting on my desk. It contained a present from Rabinovitch which he’d left at Chiltern Court before taking off for the field. It was a photograph of Joe Louis knocking out Max Schmeling with a short left jab.

  Ten minutes later I was instructed by telephone to report immediately to the security department. I’d gladly have changed places with Schmeling. I knew that the head of Security was a brilliancy of Gubbins/Sporborg calibre, and that he’d surrounded himself with a highly professional staff, most of them barristers like himself or peacetime Intelligence officers. His secretary silently pointed to a nearby office, and told me to go straight in.

  I opened the door – and had to lean against it for support.

  Seated behind a desk was my godfather, Major O’Reilly of the Special Branch at Scotland Yard, who’d been responsible for introducing me to Bedford.

  He was studying my code report, and silently pointed to a chair without looking up. He turned back a few pages to reread something, disliked it as much the second time and finally closed the report.

  I learned from his opening remarks that he’d been a member of SOE since its inception. He’d seen my name several months ago when it was being put through the cards* but had done nothing whatsoever to ease my way into SOE. I told him that I was glad for his sake.

  The courtesies then ended.

  He informed me that I was the first NDO in the history of SOE who had failed to report a single one of the scraps of paper which the security department deliberately left lying around as a trap for indolent young watchpuppies like me! He then read me a list of the items which his department had planted on the night I was on duty, not one of which I had even mentioned. The rotten apples in the desk included one which had been hollowed out for an explosive charge and I hadn’t even troubled to examine it. My respect for his directorate increased by the second.

  ‘Before I deal with far and away the worst offence of its kind that I can recall,’ he said, ‘perhaps you’d care to explain what this is.’ He held out a sheet of paper with which I was only too familiar.

  ‘It’s only a poem-code I wrote last night. It hasn’t been issued to an agent.’ Nor was it ever going to be! I’d spent most of my time on the NDO’s bed thinking about a lady ‘night duty officer’ who was permanently on call in her Park West flat, and I’d j
otted down the principal recommendations I would make to her for passing what remained of the night to our mutual benefit:

  Tickle my wallypad

  Tongue my zonker

  And make an oaktree

  Out of a conker …

  He retrieved it from me in silence. It was part of the evidence. The more the better.

  The next five minutes were riveting. His invective had been incubated in Ireland and honed in Whitehall and he could have written some interesting poems for the ditty-box. I had never seen anyone quite as angry, with the exception of Tommy when we’d first met and my boyhood CD (the high master of St Paul’s) whenever we’d met. I should be hauled up in front of the real CD very soon.

  A cryptographer’s mind never stops counting frequencies, even in moments of extreme duress, and mine registered that the major was repeating himself. He had twice told me that he had several times read my report and now he was saying it again. I wondered what Freud would have made out of this, apart from a fortune. I began thinking about a Belgian indecipherable which had just come in until I heard myself being accused of ‘playing silly buggers’. It was then that I noticed certain personality changes in the major which alarmed me. The lilt had crept back into his voice, his manner had mellowed and he was softening into granite. Before I could do a thing to prevent it, the room became oppressive with imminent forgiveness. Since it was my first offence, and was my first stint of night duty, and I did seem to care about my job, he was going to exercise his discretion and let me off with a warning. Just this once. He pointed firmly to the door.

  So much for my concept of SOE-mindedness. I couldn’t even get myself reported!

  Determined to try again, I wondered how I could reach Lord Selborne or go even higher, to Colonel Tiltman of Bletchley Park.

  He called me back in mid-speculation, and, as casually as any Irishman can, said that he didn’t wish me to misconstrue his leniency. It had nothing to do with his friendship with Father. There was another reason for it.

  He finally said that a lady whose judgement he respected had spoken quite highly of me and that if I had any problems I could do a lot worse than talk them over with her.