Sublime

He was no longer the man he had known, or rather thought himself.

The Abwehr intelligence service employed two kinds of cipher. German secret agents in the field were given simple systems you could work out with pencil and paper (sometimes called manual or hand ciphers) to scramble the messages they sent by wireless to their controllers. These were the twigs and branches of secret communications. The ‘ham radio’

However, when Abwehr offices communicated the agents’ messages onwards to Berlin or got replies from HQ, they were mechanically enciphered using the Abwehr-modified Enigma machines. This more difficult and more important trunk system of secret communications was first broken by Dilly Knox on 8 December 1941 (the day after the Pearl Harbor attack),

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

Je n'avais jamais vu, dans la vie civile, un homme aussi nerveux et aussi impatient que Robert Cohn. Cela m'amusait. C'était dégoûtant de m'en réjouir, mais je me sentais dégoûtant. Cohn avait un talent remarquable pour éveiller dans chacun les pires défauts.