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.

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

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

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 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

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

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’.

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.

He was silent for an agent’s lifetime.