Between Silk and Cyanide Read online

  One night I was engaged in this particular labour of hate when, without any warning, the head of SOE walked in. He was known to his organisation as ‘CD’, a tiny symbol to embrace so vast a man. Despite his size, Sir Charles Hambro could move very quietly and was prone to prowl corridors. His tours of inspection were always unexpected. He had seen a light on in my office and had come to investigate.

  Sir Charles looked at me intently, as if trying to recall where he had seen me before. I willed him one of my blockages.

  CD didn’t know it, but we were neighbours. He had taken a flat in Park West, a Hambro-sized block in Edgware Road, which for him was only a stride away from Baker Street. My parents and I had lived there since the building had first opened, a comment on its durability. Our flat overlooked Sir Charles’s and we had an excellent view of his bathroom window. CD was very security-minded when the blackout was on but relaxed his vigilance the moment it wasn’t. We frequently had the privil-ege of watching the oversized banker wedged in his undersized bath, and Father suggested that he farted his way out.

  It was in a very much larger bath that CD had watched a gymkhana of my own.

  Park West had a swimming pool with a special facility for those requiring even more rigorous exercise than that on offer in their one-room flats. It consisted of thirty or so ropes suspended from the ceiling with steel rings attached to the ends of them. These ropes stretched across the entire length of the pool, a few feet above the water. To cultivate the muscles necessary for my dealings with the Signals directorate, I swung across these ropes forty or fifty times a morning with obsessive regularity. To vary the monotony, and because it was the only physical risk I had yet taken in the war, I frequently performed this exercise fully clothed. One particular morning I was swinging happily from ring to ring like a trainee gorilla, with my gas mask dangling from my shoulder and my bowler hat jammed firmly over my eyes, when I peered up at the balcony to see the head of SOE staring down at me with riveted astonishment. I was taught manners at St Paul’s, if nothing else, tried to raise my hat, and seconds later gazed respectfully up at him from the bottom of the pool.

  Now, as he filled the doorway of my office, I was once again in the deep end. There were one or two items on my desk which CD must on no account see. I stood up, which made no appreciable difference to the view, and introduced myself. CD’s bald head hovered over my desk like a barrage balloon over suspect territory. I believed that most merchant bankers were bent and hoped that this one couldn’t read backwards. He sat down and enquired what I was doing.

  ‘Breaking an indecipherable, sir.’

  ‘Oh? An indecipherable. Oh. Whose?’

  ‘His code name’s Asparagus, sir. He’s one of Major Buckmaster’s agents.’

  The broken indecipherable lying in front of me contained several references to mon général which CD was unlikely to mistake for Maurice Buckmaster of F section even at the end of his longest day. CD expressed interest in seeing the message and held out a giant hand. There was nothing I could do but shake it. Prompt diversionary action was necessary. I grabbed a sheet of paper covered in figures and ash, told him that these were my calculations for breaking the message and proceeded to improvise a mathematical explanation. The figures were, in fact, my attempts to work out my monthly salary after the finance department had deducted tax. Fortunately CD was quite prepared to believe that codes were beyond him. A few moments later he professed himself very impressed by what he had seen and got up to go. I had no wish to delay him.

  ‘I was under the impression’, CD said quietly, ‘that Asparagus was Dutch.’

  I felt like melted butter.

  He was right, of course. Vegetables such as Cucumber, Broccoli and Kale were code names for Dutch agents, who had been very much on my mind that day.

  The ineptitude of this lie to CD was the moment of truth for the shape of codes to come. It convinced me, and I could never go back on it, that the traditional theory that all agents must memorise their codes was totally wrong.

  If a healthy ‘swinging’ young man, in no danger at all except from himself, could allow his unconscious to express its tensions in a lie which even his dear old dad would have seen through, then how much worse must it be for agents under duress struggling to remember their false names, their imaginary families and the hundreds of other detailed lies on which their survival depended. I was determined to give them a code which would protect them instead of their having to protect it, or I would leave SOE.

  I cleared what remained of my throat. ‘Do the country sections ever admit if their agents are caught?’

  That held him, and he asked me what I meant. Unsure of how much of this would be filtered back to Ozanne, I said that the security checks SOE was using seemed to be very unreliable; and it was curious that although certain agents, particularly the Dutch, consistently omitted their security checks, their country sections ignored the implication that they might have been caught.

  Looking at me intently, Hambro asked how long I had been with SOE. When I told him two months, he instructed me to continue asking questions until I found the right answers, his tone suggesting that he knew this would not be easy. He then said that it was time I went home and strode down the corridor like an elephant in slippers.

  An hour later he was running his bath.

  *

  SOE regarded the Signals directorate as a benign post office which delivered the mail more or less on time, could be given a kick in the transmitters if it didn’t, but never caused anyone the slightest bother. The last thing the country sections expected was that a junior member of that inoffensive directorate would call on them – on the absurd pretext that the new codes he was devising must be shaped to meet their long-term requirements. Many times during that fact-finding tour I felt as if I were travelling across Europe in a carrycot with a suspect visa.

  No matter which country section I visited, everything was in short supply except confusion, and it was easy to mis-assess country-section officers because the constant need for improvisation made it difficult to distinguish the few who understood their jobs from the majority who didn’t.

  That was the marvellous and the terrifying part of SOE in its adolescence: it was pitted and pockmarked with improbable people doing implausible things for imponderable purposes and succeeding by coincidence. One thing alone made it worth the price of the ticket. It was at the low levels at which I mixed – amongst the people SOE didn’t really know it had – that the excitement of discovery really lay. It peaked and stayed there whenever I met the proud holder of the title ‘Chairman of the Awkward Squad’ – Flight Lieutenant Yeo-Thomas, who was one day to change his name by resistance-movement deed poll to ‘the White Rabbit’.

  ‘Our Tommy’ certainly wasn’t everyone’s Tommy. Many people in SOE disliked him intensely but that wasn’t his only recommendation. He spoke bilingual French and had spent most of his life in France amongst Frenchmen. In 1939 he was general manager of one of the world’s most famous fashion houses – Molyneux of Paris, then at the haute of its couture. He ‘persuaded’ the RAF to let him enlist as a ranker at the age of thirty-eight. Three years later it was SOE’s turn and he joined RF section as pilot officer.

  Not even SOE could miss his immediate impact on the Duke Street intransigents. To his superiors’ astonishment he was able to criticise the Free French to their faces without causing a national temper tantrum and was the only Englishman actually welcomed into Duke Street by de Gaulle’s fearsome right fist, young Colonel Passy. After Churchill, the man Tommy most admired was de Gaulle, and the Free French respected him for it even if Baker Street didn’t. But there was one aspect of Tommy’s conduct which worried SOE’s hierarchy even more than his loyalty to Duke Street. He had earned his coveted title because he refused to obey SOE’s house rule forbidding officers of different country sections from exchanging information. Tommy was always prepared to compare notes on the Gestapo, and similar obscenities, with anyone in SOE of whatever nationali
ty; in the insularity which passed for security, few responded.

  He hadn’t waited till the Christmas after next to see for himself how indecipherables were broken. He’d looked in a few nights after our first meeting and ever since then we’d indulged in a series of late-night chat shows during which we exchanged grievances, and shared the Havana cigars which I’d stolen from my father.

  There were only two subjects which we never referred to. I didn’t tell him that I was keeping a ‘watching brief’ on de Gaulle’s secret code, and Tommy for his part never tried to involve me in a discussion about the rival French section run by Buckmaster, which recruited from those who owed no allegiance to de Gaulle. He disapproved of the principle of there being two French sections to win one war and left it at that.

  One smoky midnight, when I hadn’t seen him for about a week and was almost missing him, I was struggling with an indecipherable from a Norwegian wireless operator named Gunwald Tomstad. Wilson had told me that the Admiralty was anxiously waiting to read Tomstad’s message and wanted to pass its contents to ‘a former naval person’. And then, as if reference to Churchill was not sufficient incentive, Wilson proceeded to warn me that if we hadn’t broken the message before Tomstad’s next schedule – which was only a few hours away – he would order him to re-encode and repeat it no matter what the consequences.

  I thought of all the things Tomstad had done right as I tried to rectify what he hadn’t.

  He was a farmer who lived near a seaport and regularly reported the movements of U-boats. He seemed to regard submarines as an extension of his livestock and his reports had already despatched six to market, with two ‘possibles’. But U-boat spotting was only the fringe of farmer Tomstad’s war effort.

  In 1941 he had been wireless operator for Odd Starheim (code name Cheese) and had sent a message from Starheim reporting that four German warships were hiding in a fjord. The Admiralty immediately despatched the Prince of Wales and the Hood, and the subsequent sinking of the Bismarck and the crippling of the Prinz Eugen were directly attributable to Starheim’s messages and Tomstad’s operating.

  Starheim was now back in London giving Wilson no peace until he was allowed to join Tomstad and demanding to know the content of his latest message.

  I tried my thousandth key without success. There was little time left. I didn’t hear the door open but knew who was standing there.

  Tommy recognised the symptoms of ‘indecipherabilititis’ and asked if he could help. I told him the bastard indecipherable wasn’t from France. He shot me a tommy-gun look of utter contempt, then took off his tunic and sat down at the desk.

  He spent the next two hours doing the dull, routine job of checking my worksheets without really understanding them, but it was help beyond price to Tomstad and me. We pierced the indecipherable’s hull at three in the morning (‘cruiser in harbour disguised as island with tree in the middle’). Tommy didn’t even glance at the clear-text. I’d have liked to tell him that it might soon be on its way to the man he most admired, a ‘former naval person’ – but I couldn’t. I went into Dansey’s office, closed the door and read the clear-text on the ‘scrambler’ to the Norwegian duty officer.

  I returned to my office to finish the job.

  The coders of Grendon had done all they could to break that message, and they deserved the satisfaction of succeeding. I telephoned the night supervisor and told her that I hadn’t broken the message and was on my way home. I suggested twenty or so keys, including the correct one, and asked her to pass them to the night squad. I reminded her that if they did have any success, the message must be teleprinted to London marked ‘Absolute Priority’. I wished them better luck than I’d had.

  Tommy studied me thoughtfully as I gave him his cigar. ‘How old are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Twenty-three.’ I was tempted to be more specific and add ‘next month’; I enjoyed presents.

  He gave me one: ‘Would you like’, he asked, ‘to tell me what’s worrying you?’

  I memorised the way he said it so that I could try it on the coders.

  ‘Thanks, Tommy. But it would take all night.’

  ‘I’ve got all night.’

  ‘It’s the poem-code! It has to go.’

  ‘Tell me why. And then tell me what you think should replace it.’

  I spared him nothing. My worry had a technical name: transposition keys. They were the code equivalent of an anxiety neurosis.

  Every agent had to work out his transposition keys before he could either send a message or decode one from us. I wanted Tommy to see for himself the kind of effort this involved in the soothing atmosphere of occupied Europe.

  I asked him if there were any particular poem or phrase he would like to use; he left it to me. I wrote one out and told him it was based on an SOE opinion poll:

  Y

  E

  O

  T

  H

  O

  M

  A

  S

  I

  S

  A

  P

  A

  I

  N

  I

  N

  T

  H

  E

  A

  R

  S

  E

  Alphabetically, the earlier letter in that phrase is a. I asked him to put the figure 1 beneath it.

  Y

  E

  O

  T

  H

  O

  M

  A

  S

  I

  S

  A

  P

  A

  I

  N

  I

  N

  T

  H

  E

  A

  R

  S

  E

  1

  Then the figure 2 beneath the second a, a 3 beneath the third, a 4 beneath the fourth:

  Y

  E

  O

  T

  H

  O

  M

  A

  S

  I

  S

  A

  P

  A

  I

  N

  I

  N

  T

  H

  E

  A

  R

  S

  E

  1

  2

  3

  4

  The next letter is E. I asked him to put a 5 beneath it. Then 6 and 7 beneath the remaining Es.

  Y

  E

  O

  T

  H

  O

  M

  A

  S

  I

  S

  A

  P

  A

  I

  N

  I

  N

  T

  H

  E

  A

  R

  S

  E

  5

  1

  2

  3

  6

  4

  7

  Without waiting to be asked, Tommy continued numbering the rest of the letters in alphabetical order until we were looking at:

  Y

  E

  O

  T

  H

  O

  M

  A

  S

  I

  S

  A

  P

  A

  I

  N

  I

  N

  T

  H

  E

  A

  R

  S

  E

  25.

  5.

  16.

  23.

  8.

  17.

  13.

  1.

  20.

&nb
sp; 10.

  21.

  2.

  18.

  3.

  11.

  14.

  12.

  15.

  24.

  9.

  6.

  4.

  19.

  22.

  7.

  That numbered phrase was called a transposition key. I broke the good news that all messages were encoded on a pair of transposition keys – so the agent now had to start numbering another one using, for security reasons, a different five words of his poem. An interesting repeat performance with an uninvited audience on the prowl outside.

  The slightest mistake in the numbering would render the entire message indecipherable. The smallest error in the spelling would also produce gibberish. The permutations of mistakes an agent could make ran into hundreds of millions – and he still hadn’t started to encode his message.

  To do so, the agent used his transposition keys to put his clear-text through a series of complex convolutions not unlike Ozanne’s mind, so that the message arrived in London in jumbled form, where we (hopefully) could unscramble it because we (hopefully) were the only ones who knew what his poem was.

  Unless the Germans had tortured it out of him.

  Or unless their cryptographers had broken one of his messages – and mathematically reconstructed the words of his poem.