‘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 …’

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.

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

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

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

He was silent for an agent’s lifetime.

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

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

Major offences in SOE – such as leakages to C, which were considered almost as treasonable as leakages to the enemy – were dealt with by the Executive Council. Minor offences, such as being right, were disciplined by the directorate in which they occurred.