Between Silk and Cyanide

A new menace emerged in the first week of February which threatened SOE with extinction. Since there had been only eighteen months’ advance notice of it, it took Baker Street as a whole (which occasionally it was) completely by surprise.

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’.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.