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’.

‘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 …’

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

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 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

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.

He was silent for an agent’s lifetime.