Between Silk and Cyanide

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.

A one-man obstacle course, the colonel was opposed to any kind of change except in his rank.

A new menace emerged in the first week of February which threatened SOE with extinction. Since there had been only eighteen months’ advance notice of it, it took Baker Street as a whole (which occasionally it was) completely by surprise.

Heffer had once asked me to define a good security risk and I’d replied, ‘Someone who knows whom it’s safe to be indiscreet to.’ If there was slightly more truth in this than in most pat responses, then a bad security risk was somebody likely to confide in the wrong ‘safe someone’.

‘In his determination to find short cuts, he is apt to be slap-dash and erratic … though his approach shows some signs of originality, he is a very hard man to teach and will, I believe, be an even harder one to place …’

Signal plans, call-signs and codes were the fundamentals of clandestine communication. But the Signals directorate allowed no liaison between the officers who produced them. The Gauleiter of Signals preferred to keep us apart.

The rest of my course was going to Bletchley. As for its solitary failure, an interview had been arranged for me with ‘some potty outfit in Baker Street, an open house for misfits’. If even they didn’t want me, I would be regarded as unmarketable. ‘It’s called Inter Services Research Bureau,’ said the sergeant. He lowered his voice. ‘It’s got anoth

An agent’s inner ear could pick up anxieties more quickly than instructions. Agents also had a flair for infecting one another. I’d twice known sadness to be wafted round a briefing room as if someone were smoking it.

I had been accepted as a pupil at a school for cryptographers. Gaining admission hadn’t been easy: I’d written to the War Office, the Foreign Office and the Admiralty, enclosing specimens of my home-made codes with a curriculum vitae based loosely on fact, but no more loosely than their formal replies stating that my letters were receiving attentio