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

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.

‘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 …’

No matter which country section I visited, everything was in short supply except confusion, and it was easy to mis-assess country-section officers because the constant need for improvisation made it difficult to distinguish the few who understood their jobs from the majority who didn’t. That was the marvellous and the terrifying part of SOE in its

Fifteen new pupils, including two young women, had been selected for the course and we sat at separate desks in a large, bright room, studying the mating habits of the alphabet, counting the frequency of letters and working our way through exercises which gradually became more difficult until we were ready to tackle codes of military and diplomatic

The ladies of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, otherwise known as the coders of Grendon, had force-fed their eight indecipherables with a diet of transposition keys, and all but one of the invalids had responded to treatment. The

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

He was silent for an agent’s lifetime.