Between Silk and Cyanide: A Code Maker’s War 1941–45 by Leo Marks

Author:Leo Marks
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-08-22T14:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-NINE

Appointment with Royalty

‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’ caused forty-eight hours of purgatory when an F-section agent spelt hell with three ‘l’s. But that was a year ago, which meant it was ancient history, and I’d long since discovered a quicker road to hell.

It led from my black-market flat to the abattoir which employed me, and every inch of it was paved with discarded ideas for winning the code war. But last night’s arrival reached Baker Street intact. It was far more than just another coding system. It was a wholly new approach to the job.

Credit for it (an important consideration even in wartime) belonged to the country-section heads.

The experience of seeing six of them in situ at a time when nothing was going right for them had been as great a revelation to me as WOKs had been to them. The bloody-minded resilience with which they responded to disasters, especially those of their own making, and their determination to liberate their territories no matter what, had been my first glimpse of what would one day be known as the ‘spirit of resistance’.

I’d made another discovery about them which came as an even bigger surprise, if only because it was obvious.

Aggression was their common denominator, and each of them had as much in his make-up as a saint’s unconscious. They taught me (without knowing it) that I was only half-doing my job. It wasn’t enough to give agents safe codes and reliable security checks. These were defensive measures.

We must mount a deception scheme to convince the enemy that they were confronting poem-codes, when in fact they were dealing with WOKs. LOPs would be harder to counterfeit but could be thought about later. I christened the offensive ‘Operation Gift-Horse’, and decided to forget it for a week to give its flaws a chance to emerge.

But Gift-Horse refused to canter away, and I spent several hours jotting down the clues which would most attract the enemy.

Late that night someone knocked on the door, so I knew it couldn’t be Tommy.

Maurice Buckmaster apologised for disturbing me, slumped into a chair and was silent for thirty seconds, which may well have set a record.

I expected bad news about Peter and Odette.

‘I wish that damn canteen was open,’ he finally said.

That at least I could remedy.

Between mouthfuls of Mother’s sandwiches, he again apologised for disturbing me, then blurted out a name.

‘Noor Inayat Khan!’

Getting no response, he explained that she was a WT operator who’d finished her course at Beaulieu and was due to be dropped into France in ten days’ time.

He stressed that although Beaulieu hadn’t had to teach her a damn thing about operating a set, as she’d previously been trained by the RAF (‘who were damn sorry to lose her’), the problem was that ‘that bastard Spooner’ (Beaulieu’s CO) had ‘taken against her’, and had written a report saying that she was ‘temperamentally unsuitable’ to be an agent and would be a major security risk if she were sent to the field.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.