Between Silk and Cyanide Read Online Free
Author: Leo Marks
Tags: Historical, History, Biography & Autobiography, World War II, Military, 20th Century, Modern
contacted Station 53 on the direct line.
The operator was still on the air, about to be asked to repeat the message. I told the signalmaster to cancel the instruction and send the Morse equivalent of 'Piss off fast.'
Breaking that indecipherable to the applause of my public meant far more to me at the time than that factory in remotest Vermok which Skinnarland had described in minutest detail. The rest of SOE remained equally remote.
The most distinguished visitors to our mews stronghold were the night duty officers who collected the confidential waste and the ladies who pushed around the teatrolley twice a day like sisters of mercy. But one afternoon I was struggling with yet another indecipherable from Skinnarland, who was rapidly becoming my least favourite agent, when I heard an uncommonly authoritative, disconcertingly purposeful barrage of footsteps coming our way. A moment later an RAF officer strode into the room and commandeered it without a word being spoken. I had never seen anger of such quality and substance, power and purpose as this man projected. It should have been weighed by the pound and sold as an example.
I forgot about Skinnarland as he advanced on my startled superior, making no attempt to conceal his repugnance at a pink slip (an internal message to Station 53) which was clutched in his outstretched hand.
'Who's responsible for sending this?'
'He is.'
The flight lieutenant transferred his attention to me, and his first question set the tone of our encounter: 'Who the devil are you?'
Every officer in SOE was allocated a symbol for use in correspondence; Dansey's was DYC, Owen's DYC/0. At last I had a chance to use mine. 'DYC/M,' I said, quoting it with relish.
'Tony had a sked at nine tonight. You've bloody cancelled it.! Why?'
Tony was an agent stranded in France with the Gestapo searching for him. A Lysander was standing by to pick him up, but his message giving map references had been indecipherable. He was due to repeat it.
'I cancelled it,' I said, 'because an hour ago we broke it after three thousand, one hundred and fifty-four attempts.'
Skinnarland's indecipherable whispered something to me in its coding sleep.
'How did you break it?'
A word was forming which could be 'mountain'.
'HOW DID YOU BREAK IT?'
It was 'mountain'.
'By guess and by God,' I said without looking up.
'Really, DYC/M? And which were you?'
'Barren mountain'—I hoped it would make sense to Wilson.
'Flight Lieutenant, if you come back in a year's time I may have finished this bugger, and I'll be glad to answer all your questions.'
'Very well, DYC/M. I'll look in again the Christmas after next, if you haven't won the war by then.'
He closed the hangar door behind him. I could still feel him looking at me.
'Who was that sod?'
'Didn't you know? That's Yeo-Thomas. Our Tommy!… he's quite a character.'
I didn't realize it at the time but 'quite a character' was even more of an understatement than 84's tax returns.
TWO
The Pilot Light
SOE's security checks were so insecure that I thought the real ones were being withheld from me. Their function was to tell us whether an agent was coding under duress. To convey this to us without the enemy being aware of it, he was required to insert various dummy letters in the body of each message—and their absence or alteration in any way was supposed to alert us immediately to his capture. As an additional 'precaution' he was instructed to make deliberate spelling mistakes at prearranged spots. The whole concept had all the validity of a child's excuses for staying up late, with none of the imagination. It took no account of the possibility of an agent's code being broken or tortured out of him, when the Gestapo would be in a position to work out the security checks for themselves. Nor did it make any allowances for Morse mutilation, which frequently garbled so much of the text that it was impossible to tell whether the security checks—for what little they
The operator was still on the air, about to be asked to repeat the message. I told the signalmaster to cancel the instruction and send the Morse equivalent of 'Piss off fast.'
Breaking that indecipherable to the applause of my public meant far more to me at the time than that factory in remotest Vermok which Skinnarland had described in minutest detail. The rest of SOE remained equally remote.
The most distinguished visitors to our mews stronghold were the night duty officers who collected the confidential waste and the ladies who pushed around the teatrolley twice a day like sisters of mercy. But one afternoon I was struggling with yet another indecipherable from Skinnarland, who was rapidly becoming my least favourite agent, when I heard an uncommonly authoritative, disconcertingly purposeful barrage of footsteps coming our way. A moment later an RAF officer strode into the room and commandeered it without a word being spoken. I had never seen anger of such quality and substance, power and purpose as this man projected. It should have been weighed by the pound and sold as an example.
I forgot about Skinnarland as he advanced on my startled superior, making no attempt to conceal his repugnance at a pink slip (an internal message to Station 53) which was clutched in his outstretched hand.
'Who's responsible for sending this?'
'He is.'
The flight lieutenant transferred his attention to me, and his first question set the tone of our encounter: 'Who the devil are you?'
Every officer in SOE was allocated a symbol for use in correspondence; Dansey's was DYC, Owen's DYC/0. At last I had a chance to use mine. 'DYC/M,' I said, quoting it with relish.
'Tony had a sked at nine tonight. You've bloody cancelled it.! Why?'
Tony was an agent stranded in France with the Gestapo searching for him. A Lysander was standing by to pick him up, but his message giving map references had been indecipherable. He was due to repeat it.
'I cancelled it,' I said, 'because an hour ago we broke it after three thousand, one hundred and fifty-four attempts.'
Skinnarland's indecipherable whispered something to me in its coding sleep.
'How did you break it?'
A word was forming which could be 'mountain'.
'HOW DID YOU BREAK IT?'
It was 'mountain'.
'By guess and by God,' I said without looking up.
'Really, DYC/M? And which were you?'
'Barren mountain'—I hoped it would make sense to Wilson.
'Flight Lieutenant, if you come back in a year's time I may have finished this bugger, and I'll be glad to answer all your questions.'
'Very well, DYC/M. I'll look in again the Christmas after next, if you haven't won the war by then.'
He closed the hangar door behind him. I could still feel him looking at me.
'Who was that sod?'
'Didn't you know? That's Yeo-Thomas. Our Tommy!… he's quite a character.'
I didn't realize it at the time but 'quite a character' was even more of an understatement than 84's tax returns.
TWO
The Pilot Light
SOE's security checks were so insecure that I thought the real ones were being withheld from me. Their function was to tell us whether an agent was coding under duress. To convey this to us without the enemy being aware of it, he was required to insert various dummy letters in the body of each message—and their absence or alteration in any way was supposed to alert us immediately to his capture. As an additional 'precaution' he was instructed to make deliberate spelling mistakes at prearranged spots. The whole concept had all the validity of a child's excuses for staying up late, with none of the imagination. It took no account of the possibility of an agent's code being broken or tortured out of him, when the Gestapo would be in a position to work out the security checks for themselves. Nor did it make any allowances for Morse mutilation, which frequently garbled so much of the text that it was impossible to tell whether the security checks—for what little they
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