Between Silk and Cyanide Read Online Free PDF Page A

SOE. there shall be no SUCH THING AS AN INDECIPHERABLE MESSAGE.'
    I knew I would be overloading the girls if I continued but I couldn't resist it. I wanted them to see how the enemy would now mathematically reconstruct the five words on which the message had been encoded.
    It took them twenty minutes to recover those words but no one could identify the rest of the poem. I spoke it to them in full: ' "Be near me when my light is low…"'
    Two days later they sent me a message on the teleprinter: 'WE HAVE BROKEN OUR FIRST INDECIPHERABLE. THE CODERS OF GRENDON.'
    I sent them a message of congratulations on behalf of all agents.
    The pilot light in SOE's code room had started to burn.

THREE
     
     
A Collector's Item
     
    By July '42 I felt sufficiently at home to rummage through the Top Secret documents on Dansey's desk while he and Owen were conferring with Ozanne. Remembering that 'You mustn't judge a book by its cover' was not only an agent's code-phrase but a Marks and Co. house rule, I ignored all the Top Secret documents, and selected for my further education an innocuous-looking folder which was lying in an in-tray.
    It contained a prime collector's item: a Situation Report on the Free French, 'For Most Limited Distribution Only'. It soon became apparent even to my racing eyes that SOE and de Gaulle were too busy belittling each other's achievements to learn from each other's mistakes. The report also made clear that the in-fighting between de Gaulle and SOE had infected our policy-makers. They were unanimous that France was the life's blood of SOE but couldn't decide whether the formidable Frenchman should be treated as a valued ally or an internal haemorrhage. The sound of Dansey's footsteps stopped the rush of de Gaulle's blood to my head.
    The report made no reference to a concession which SOE had made to de Gaulle in the interests of Anglo-French relations. It was a concession which amounted to a licence to lose agents and in the midnight privacy of my cubbyhole I referred to it as 'the Free French fuck-up'.
    It was otherwise known as General de Gaulle's secret code. Although de Gaulle, when he first occupied London in 1940, had had nothing he could call his own except France, and badly needed wireless facilities to tell her so, he had insisted at the outset of his negotiations with SOE that all Free French agents must be allowed to use a secret French code in addition to the one which SOE would provide.
    Our embryonic organization, having to fight for its life in the Cabinet as well as in the field, didn't wish to risk losing the Free French forces without having had a chance to evaluate them, and agreed to the use of a secret French code on one condition: the clear-texts of all messages in this code were to be distributed at once to RF section which SOE had formed to deal exclusively with the Free French. General de Gaulle gave his undertaking, the principle was established and both sides agreed that there was to be no departure from it.
    SOE then laid on a special drill to implement this decision which was sufficiently convoluted to keep all parties happy: whenever a message was received from the field with a prefix denoting that it was in secret French code, Station 53 teleprinted it to Dansey's distribution department—which then passed it to RF section, which then passed it to General de Gaulle's Duke Street headquarters, which then decoded it and passed it back en clair to RF section—which passed it back to DDD (Dansey's distribution department) for circulation.
    Conversely, messages to the field were handed over in code to RF section, with the en clair texts, and RF section then passed them to DDD, which then transmitted the code messages to Station 53, which then transmitted them.
    This had become accepted procedure and no one saw the slightest reason to disturb it. Nor had anyone in SOE raised the minor matter of what kind of code the Free French were using. I hoped that they kept it as secret from the