Between Silk and Cyanide Read Online Free PDF

Germans as they did from us.
    I watched these messages passing through the code department like distinguished strangers. And what distinguished them more than anything else was that one out of every three was indecipherable. I wasn't allowed to break them, nudge Duke Street into breaking them, or provide any kind of first aid for them whatever.
    They were de Gaulle's untouchables. And every one of them reduced our battle-cry 'There shall be no such thing as an indecipherable message' to the level of a good intention.
    Nor did they promote mutual confidence at my briefing sessions with the Free French. It was hard to face the agents knowing that I could help them when they made mistakes in their British code, but must look the other way when they made them in their French. But, as Dansey firmly and sympathetically pointed out, it was de Gaulle's code; SOE had agreed to cede all jurisdiction over it, and the decision was irreversible. He advised me, though it had the force of an order, 'to leave well enough alone'.
    I enquired whether he meant 'sick enough alone' and turned to go.
    'Keep up the good work,' he said.
    The only good work I was party to was being done by the coders of Grendon, who regarded an agent's indecipherable as a personal affront and did their best to scratch its eyes out. They had begun performing with the precision of relay racers and, by passing the baton of indecipherables from one eager shift to another, had succeeded in breaking 80 per cent of them within a few hours.
    The bloody-minded ones which didn't respond, such as Einar Skinnarland's, they grudgingly passed on to me.
    I visited the coders as often as I could to suggest quicker ways to the finishing post, to brief them about new agents, and because I enjoyed the illusion of their undivided attention. Unfortunately during one of these visits I was in the middle of explaining that the Free French were the only agents burdened with a secret code of which de Gaulle allowed us to know nothing, and that the strain of having to use two systems caused the agents to send an inordinate number of indecipherables in their British codes when Ozanne waddled in on a state visit. I immediately stopped referring to a forbidden subject but His Signals Majesty summoned me to his office to declare my interest.
    I explained that indecipherables in secret French code had shot up by an alarming 12 per cent, and that Duke Street seemed to make no effort to break them. I then broke off on compassionate grounds as Ozanne's complexion had suddenly begun to match the colour of his tabs and I suspected that his blood pressure had shot up by an alarming 100 per cent. He left me in no doubt whatever that if I wanted to keep my job I was never again to discuss, question or even about the secret French code. It was entirely de Gaulle's business and anyone who didn't understand this had no place in the Signals directorate. He reminded me that I was there 'simply to keep an eye on agents' traffic', and was kind enough to add that he had heard good reports about me from Pollock and Dansey. He then assured me that if I had any important problems, I could always bring them direct to him.
    A week later a Free French wireless operator was captured by the Gestapo while he was still on the air. He had begun to sign off after transmitting a message 250 letters long with a prefix denoting that it was in secret French code. Duke Street released the text of this message early next morning. It was a repeat of an indecipherable he had sent a week earlier and ended with an apology from the agent for his mistake in coding.
    I waited until Dansey and Owen had left, then locked the door of my office and set about unlocking de Gaulle's secret code. My first step was to select a dozen outgoing messages in secret code, a dozen incoming, and compare them with the en clair texts which Duke Street had sent us.
    This was not an exercise in cryptography. With the facilities at my disposal it was a game of