Between Silk and Cyanide

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 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

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

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

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’.

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

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.