Between Silk and Cyanide

The need to justify and its sister frailty, the need to boast, were lethal weaknesses in SOE,

The Establishment was officially called SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) though old hands in SOE invariably referred to the rival organisation as ‘C’ (its Chief’s code name), and its speciality was thwarting SOE. C had been running the British Secret Service (with emphasis on the Secret) since 1911 and were appalled when SOE received a mandate fro

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

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.

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 said that all country sections had ‘Voice of Freedom’ facilities from the BBC to broadcast plain-language code phrases to their respective territories. The rival French sections were the most prolific broadcasters and shared a BBC programme called ‘Les Français Parlent aux Français’, which was about all that they did share. Other country sections

The agents were using poems for their codes. Or famous quotations. Or anything they could easily remember. This concept of clandestine coding had been adopted by SOE because of a theory, traditional in Intelligence, that if an agent were caught and searched it was better security if his code were in his head. I had a gut feeling right from the star

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

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