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March 2001
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Covert loop antenna | Book review : Between Silk & Cyanide | News Items
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What a nice idea it would be to order this book using the search form located at the bottom of this page! |
"Set Europe Ablaze" urged Winston Churchill in mobilising the Special Operations Executive in 1940 to wage war against the Nazis. But lighting fires behind enemy lines was easier said than done. The enemy all too often seemed closer to home. Baker Street, SOE headquarters, fought bitter Whitehall wars to get even the basic tools for the job.
Yet the real face of the battle was waged by agents in the field; who faced betrayal, capture, torture and death. Their lifeline was the radio link with London. If it snapped or fell into enemy hands, disaster could follow. Codes and ciphers were the bodyguards of radio and agent: their story lies at the very heart of the SOE.
The merit of Leo Mark's highly readable book is to link the business of codes and ciphers to the fates of individual agents and operations, and thus transform his tale into a human drama. Recruited as a precocious 22-year-old cryptographer by Baker Street, this irritant to hierarchy enjoyed post-war success as a playwright and screenwriter. Words are in his blood - his father founded the now legendary rare bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road - and he knows how to get the reader to turn the page.
Ironically, his real achievement in SOE was to stop the very thing for which he is mainly remembered - the poem codes that agents took into the field, especially the one he composed for Violette Szabo, who was later executed at Ravensbruck. Prefacing the book, it opens with the poignant lines: "The Life that I have/Is all that I have/And the life that I have/Is yours." Marks, who inherited the system, decided that such codes could easily be broken and become death-traps, not lifelines. His struggle to replace them with codes printed on silk that could be destroyed after use raised Baker Street eyebrows. What difference, asked his sceptical superiors, would it make to the agents? "It's between silk and cyanide," he replied, and got his way.
One tragedy dominates his account, the infamous Englandspiel in which the Germans used the codes of captured Dutch agents to lure over 50 to their death. Often afraid and on the run, agents made encoding errors known as "indecipherable's". Alerted by their absence in messages from Holland, Marks became suspicious. His frustrating campaign to convince his superiors that the entire Dutch network had been infiltrated by the enemy provides a suspenseful story of credulity and incredulity, hope and despair, intrigue and counter-intrigue.
It presents of course, a Marks-eye view. Even if evidence from the codes was clear, a fact obvious with hindsight, his superiors fought on other fronts, too. Painfully aware that admitting error could hand their rivals a fatal political weapon in Whitehall wars, they battled disbelief, and when all was finally revealed, were only saved by Churchill's faith in their work. Such was the damage wreaked by fear and loathing in London. The radio link was not always the lifeline it seemed. For secret agents, home can be as deadly as some foreign field.
REVIEWED BY DAVID STAFFORD.
Morse stations | Voice stations | Oddities | Notes on jamming
Covert loop antenna | Book review : Between Silk & Cyanide | News Items
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