Between Silk and Cyanide Read Online Free Page A

were worth—were present, I had already been puzzled by the traffic of a Dutch agent named Abor who'd been dropped into Holland in March. He'd sent a string of properly encoded messages—yet all of them were marked security checks omitted, and he'd clearly made no attempt to use them from the moment he'd arrived. When I raised this with N (the Dutch) section I was told there was nothing to worry about 'The whole thing has been looked into; the agent's all right.' There was so much else to worry about that I put this enigma on one side.
    I had discovered that through no fault of anyone's (a rare situation in SOE) an agent could have a long period of waiting between leaving his training school and being dispatched to the field. His 'refresher course in coding' was left to his original training officer, if he wasn't too busy, or to his country section briefing officer, if he knew how to code. In case this accounted for the high rate of indecipherables, I raised a mortgage on my confidence and offered to brief agents myself.
    Word spread quickly that someone in SOE was volunteering for extra labour, and my panel practice came of age when Buckmaster asked me to brief two F section agents named, respectively, Peter and Paul. Feeling like a pill-pusher with Messianic pretensions, I reported to F section's Orchard Court flat to meet my first pupils. Peter's surname was Churchill—and thanks to a briefing from Owen I knew far more about him than he about me. This slender man, coiled in his chair like an exclamation mark with a moustache, had got into the habit of slipping across to the South of France, usually by submarine and canoe, and staying there as long as Buckmaster and circumstances would permit. I had no idea what Peter's new mission was but he seemed no more concerned about it than a day-tripper with some business on the side. The prospect of the South of France had put him in a holiday mood and it was with some reluctance that he interrupted it for a 'spot of coding'.
    Within the next five minutes he made as many mistakes. I asked him to stop, which he did with alacrity. I knew that Peter had left Cambridge with a degree in modern languages and the reputation of being one of the finest ice-hockey blues the university had produced. Hoping to establish common ground, I discussed the 'language of coding', the rules of its 'grammar', the nature of its 'syntax'. I told him that he 'spoke coding' with a bloody awful accent which would give him away, and then switched metaphors. We chose five words of his poem and lined them up as if they were members of his hockey team, and I asked him for both our sakes to remember where the goal was. He skated through two messages without one false pass and was about to try a third when he received a phone call from Buckmaster.
    'Yes, Maurice?… meet who?… his name's what?… (I was sure he could hear but being difficult was a sport for which he'd also won a blue) but Maurice, I'm still having a hockey lesson from Marks… all right then, if I must.'
    He apologised for having to leave at half-time, promised not to get sent off for foul coding, and hurried away.
    I went next door and met my first frightened agent.
    When Paul and I shook hands they needed galoshes. He seemed even more of a refugee from the civil war of adolescence than I was. He was English but spoke French like a native and was due to be dropped into France in a few nights' time. He showed me a message he'd been working on. He'd found a way to go wrong which not even Skinnarland had thought of. He'd started by encoding his message quite normally, then switched to the process reserved for decoding it—which was like straddling two escalators going in opposite directions. This was after eight weeks of training. I took him through the whole system from beginning to end and he understood it perfectly, which was even more worrying.
    He suddenly asked what would happen if he made 'a bit of a mistake' and sent us a message which