Between Silk and Cyanide (11 page)

It took me five minutes to reach 1 Dorset Square from Chiltern Court and I was still too immersed in Norwegian waters to adjust so rapidly to a change of briny. I entered the house like a reluctant ringmaster to put the Free French through the hoops of their coding.

There would be no free flow between us. The agents were under strict orders from Duke Street not to discuss the secret French code with me and I was under strict orders from myself not to tell them to use it as seldom as possible. It would have been easier for all of us if I'd been able to brief them individually but they usually turned up in clusters of six, and today I was expecting eight.

I reminded myself at the door of the briefing room that the secret tench code was the best damn code there wasn't.
'The secret French code is the best damn—'

The briefing room was empty—as empty, that is, as any room can which has a poster of de Gaulle in it. His eyes seemed to be reading my private traffic.

The Free French were punctilious about their appointments and I wondered what had happened to my missing eight. I waited fifteen minutes, could produce nothing for the agents' ditty-box, and prepared to leave.

A hare of a colonel bounded into the room and sat down beside me. He introduced himself as Colonel Hutchison and started speaking French as if he'd invented it. If I interpreted his every other sentence correctly, he'd introduced a rule that everyone on the premises must speak only French. He also recommended that they thought in French. He relaxed his principles when he heard my accent. He had cancelled the agents' briefings in order to be briefed himself.

I asked if he wanted me to teach him to code.

'Good God, no,' he said. 'I'll set ten minutes aside for that some other time. I just want to discuss a point or two with you. Now, Marks, tell me what you know about the secret French code.'

I thought in French,
Get me out of here, mon Dieu, and I won't eat bacon for a fortnight.
This was the most dangerous question I'd yet been asked in SOE.

'The secret French code?' I echoed. 'I'm afraid I'm in no position to tell you anything about it.'

'Why not? Why all this secrecy? Tell me what you do know.'

I gave him a potted history of the code without specifying which pot it should be consigned to.

'Yes, yes,' he said impatiently, 'but what actually happens when they want to pass one?'

I presumed he meant a message in secret French code and described the mechanics of distribution as SOE believed them to be.

'So my directorate is just a clearinghouse?'

I'd heard Tommy describe it as another kind of house, but nodded.

'Good. Tommy told me you were the man I should talk to!'

Thanks, Tommy.

'Now then. Who's your opposite number in Duke Street? And what can you tell me about him?'

I had no idea where this was leading, apart from the guillotine. I told him that my opposite number's name was Druot, that we'd met once, spoken twice and that he was brilliant at forged currency, forged documents and photography.

'What about codes?'

'I understand they're one of his many commitments.'

The hare-turned-ferret may have smiled. I could certainly see his moustache more clearly. 'Tell me. How do you contact this Druot? Through RF or directly?'

'Directly, when I can. Through Tommy if it's urgent.'

'Ah yes,' he said. 'Tommy.' There was a distinct frown in his voice and I wondered if he'd had any trouble from the Chairman of the Awkward Squad.

'I want to go back to that secret code. Why—'

The phone rang. He answered at once and I listened to the most informative conversation I had yet heard in the RF directorate. 'Right, right, right, right, right, right away.'

He bounded up—'I have to see the director of Operations. But you and I will talk again! Very soon.'—and bounded out!

The length and line of his questions promised well for his directorate but badly for me. Given a little time, he was bound to notice that some incoming messages in secret French code weren't being delivered to Duke Street as promptly as they should have been, and he'd demand an explanation from Ozanne.

A phone call from Dansey—very rare when I was at a brief^ing session—instructed me to return to the office as quickly as I could.

It was equally rare for him to slam down the receiver.

Major offences in SOE—such as leakages to C, which were considered almost as treasonable as leakages to the enemy—were dealt with by the Executive Council. Minor offences, such as being right, were disciplined by the directorate in which they occurred.

Heffer, Dansey and Owen were waiting for me in Dansey's office. Heffer had just had a meeting with Ozanne and informed me with no apparent regret that the Signals directorate and I were soon to part company. I was not going to be sacked for technical incompetence ('That can sometimes backfire,' said Heffer) but on the far deadlier grounds of 'temperamental unsuitability for SOE-type work.'

Thanks to Heffer, it was a suspended sentence. He'd persuaded Ozanne that a stay of execution would give him and Dansey time to seek for a suitable replacement; Heffer had even suggested that the shock might produce a marked improvement in me. 'Start looking today!' Ozanne had instructed. The reprieve was subject to one condition. If I showed my coding report to anyone, I was to be dismissed forthwith.

On the issue of WOKs Ozanne remained inflexible. They would leave when I did.

I suggested whoever succeeded me should come from Bletchley and have the experience which I knew I lacked.

They glanced at each other. Then Heffer announced that he had something to say to me on behalf of them all: 'Now and again you've shown a certain promise. But your greatest failing amongst a host of others is that you are not—and are now most unlikely ever to become'—I expected him to say 'adult'—'SOE-minded.'

I knew that I had just heard the most important phrase anyone had ever spoken to me—with the possible exception of 'help yourself.' I also knew that for the rest of my SOE life, however short, I would go in search of 'SOE-mindedness'. It was the vitamin deficiency I didn't know I lacked.

Eagerly, gratefully, I asked what it meant. Each waited for the other to define it.

'It's a state of disgrace which you must discover for yourself.' Heffer.

'If he's here long enough.' Dansey.

'Which I doubt.' Owen.

I realized that it meant something different to each of them, a sign of its reality. I asked whom they considered to be 'SOE-minded', present company excepted, of course.

Each waited for the other to commit himself. Nobody would. I suggested some candidates.

'Hambro?'

'If he can forget he's a gentleman.' Heffer.

'Gubbins?'

'If he can forget he's a soldier.' Dansey.

'Tommy?'

'If he can forget the Free French.' Owen.

'Colonel Ozanne?'

'I prefer to forget him altogether.' Heffer.

He then rose by inches from his chair. 'It wasn't very SOE-minded of you to leave that word on the blackboard.' he said. He waited for my mouth to reach half-mast. 'Before you took for granted Ozanne wouldn't know what it meant you should have found out where he played golf on Sundays.'

He told me the name of the club—and all was clear. I'd walked the course with Father and knew that the eighteenth hole was circumcision.

'Heff… you mean he went to the trouble of anagramming it out?'

'No,' he said, 'but I did.'

He enjoyed his exit lines almost as much as he did his exits.

'SM' ('SOE-mindedness', not sado-masochism, though they might be synonymous) was a cruel dish to set before a starving man. It might explain why SOE was sending missions to Mihailovič and Tito in Yugoslavia when the two leaders were virtually at civil war, why we were backing Communists and anti-Communists in Greece, why there was so little co-operation between the rival French sections that their agents had shot each other up in the dark after mistaking each other for Germans, and why the Dutch weren't concerned about incorrect security checks. It might even explain what a man like Ozanne was doing in SOE.

I wondered how to apply 'SM' to the Signals Gauleiter, and decided to make a start by taking his orders literally. Since Ozanne insisted (that agents should have poem-codes, I would give them poem-codes—not one but dozens! Clusters of poems printed on soluble paper could be issued to each agent. They would be instructed by London to, switch from one poem to another at the first sign of their traffic becoming overloaded. Nor must they attempt to memorize the poems. They must be destroyed as soon as they were finished with. I checked with the stationery department that the printing was within their competence and they foresaw no problems. I would make a start with Grouse. The principle could then be applied to other agents and since it conformed strictly with Ozanne's coding convictions, I would not waste his time by mentioning it to him.

The concept was in every way the WOK's poor relation but it was start. If this were a form of 'SM', it didn't hurt at all.

•       •       •

Expecting my successor at any moment, I settled down to what might be my last indecipherable from Bodington, which was based (of course) on a piece by Poe.

He'd returned from the field since using 'The Raven', had gone back to France with Peter Churchill—and his latest Poe choice was 'Annabel Lee':

I was a child and she was a child
  In this kingdom by the sea
But we loved with a love that was more than love
  I and my Annabel Lee
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
  Coveted her and me

And neither the angels in heaven above
  Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee

I was determined to dissever Bodington's soul next time we met if this indecipherable was as tough as his last.

The five words he'd chosen were: 'child', 'under', 'I', 'can', 'heaven'. I knew that spelling was Bodington's weakness, possibly due to his peacetime stint as Paris correspondent of the
Daily Express
—and rapidly discovered that his version of heaven was 'heav
a
n', and hoped he'd get to both one day.

I phoned Buckmaster to tell him the message was out. To my astonishment he appeared in person a few minutes later. First Hutchison, now Buckmaster—it was like meeting the stars of a play which was still being written.

Buckmaster and I knew each other by sight and had shaken hands on the telephone. I'd met him once at Chiltern Court under unfortunate circumstances.

I'd been briefing a wireless operator named Alex Rabinovitch, a vast young man of Russian-Egyptian origin who could (and did) swear in four languages. We both knew at a glance that we shared the Esperanto of being Jewish. From the way he clenched his huge fists with the thumbs protecting his fingers, and from his ethnic backround, I suspected that he'd done some boxing and, between exerises (he was a good coder), taxed him with it. It was the end of the coding session. I'd boxed for St Paul's in the days when self was the only thing worth protecting and we discovered a mutual admiration for the greatest boxer (and gentleman) our sport had yet produced, Joe Louis. I was very disappointed that Rabinovitch knew that Louis's real name was Barrow. I thought only Joe and I did. My pupil and I then had a serious disagreement. He was convinced that the Brown Bomber's best punch was a short right to the head whereas knew for positive fact that it was a left jab to the chin. To put it beyond doubt, Rabinovitch swung his giant fist at my jaw and pulled up a microdot away just as Buckmaster walked in. Buckmaster expressed the hope that Rabinovitch was here for coding practice and not unarmed combat and asked to see him as soon as we'd finished.

Rabinovitch was now shadow-boxing in France with great success and at great risk, as the wireless operator for Peter Churchill's Spindle group. And here was Buckmaster, himself no stranger to fifteen-rounders with the RF section, looking at me thoughtfully.

I was used to being thoroughly towelled down in the ring between rounds but not by blue eyes of such extraordinary penetration. I didn't begin to understand the politics he was obliged to play to compete with de Gaulle and had no desire to. But I'd noticed that no matter how late I phoned to tell him that an indecipherable was broken, he was always waiting in his office, and his first concern was for the safety of the agent. Not all country section directors shared that attitude. To some of them, agents in the field were heads to be counted, a tally they could show CD. But Maurice Buckmaster was a family man.

He thanked me for breaking Boddington's indecipherable but he'd already done that on the telephone and Buckmaster never said anything twice. RF complained that he never said anything once. I suspected he'd come for some other reason.

'How reliable are our security checks?' he asked sharply.

This was the first country section head to ask that question. It deserved to be answered with the same directness.

'They're no more than a gesture to give the agents confidence.' I told him why in some detail.

'Can they ever be relied upon?'

I told him that if an agent was caught before he was sent any messages he could get away with giving them the wrong security check because they'd have no back traffic to compare it with. But not otherwise.

'What's being done about it?'

'We're working on a wholly new concept of agents' codes.'

He nodded. He understood the battles to get anything changed in SOE. 'Can't anything be done in the meantime?'

I told him that as long as the poem-code was in use there were only two things the country sections could do: a) they should ask their agents personal questions to which they alone would know the answers, and b) they should use prearranged phrases in their messages to which the agents must reply in a prearranged way. I warned him that these phrases must be used only once in case the agent's traffic was being read.