A Wit Bears Witness
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
A Wit Bears Witness Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War 1941-1945 By Leo Marks Free Press. 622 pp. $27.50. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers; author. "A...
...The loss of MI6's agent in 1941 would have been harmful in any case, yet if Marks' silks had been in wider use the damage would have been minimized...
...The other major success involved SOE's help in arming and organizing the French underground in support of the DDay landings...
...This allowed them to work all manner of mischief, such as making arrangements for new agents to be dropped where capture was certain, sending false intelligence to SOE, and the like...
...The differences are instructive...
...Captured in France, he managed to conceal his identity and even after being tortured escaped from Buchenwald...
...Foot has scant regard for German counterintelligence...
...The first attempt, code-named Grouse, was made by commandos...
...Marks prepared her as best he could...
...This distinguished it from MI5, which dealt with internal security, and MI6, which gathered foreign intelligence...
...Frequently agents were asked to repeat them, enormously increasing their risk of being located by German radio direction finders...
...Few if any involved knew the reason for doing so, but destroying Norsk Hydro, where it was manufactured, became a high priority...
...Two are well known but worth repeating...
...But doubts were now so rampant that N section greatly reduced its activities in Holland...
...That is all to the good, for he has produced what must be the most entertaining work ever written on codes and codebreaking...
...Day-to-day contact with British higher-ups drove Marks to distraction, while German success in "blowing" agent networks—that is, uncovering and sometimes exploiting them—was the bane of Marks' life...
...still, the conventional thinkers were right...
...Marks offers abundant evidence of incompetence and selfseeking on the part of SOE—which waged a secret war against its rival MI6 as well as the Germans...
...Marks devised two codes that were difficult if not impossible to break...
...Fluent in French and a skilled radio operator, she was nevertheless widely regarded as unsuitable for undercover work because she had been taught by her father not to lie and never grasped that this excellent principle did not apply to secret agents...
...There were also triumphs, though...
...It was not until SOE suffered its worst loss that Marks managed to win out...
...Only a neophyte, Marks was horrified to discover that SOE used a code based on memorized poems or quotations...
...it lost scores of agents and any chance of accomplishing much in Holland...
...These faulty messages, called "indecipherables," often took thousands of attempts to break...
...Then just starting up, SOE was the only British intelligence agency charged with committing acts of sabotage behind enemy lines...
...Madeleine was blown in Paris and told all to German counterintelligence, not under torture, but in the course of friendly conversations with an enemy female...
...Much of the book relates the efforts of Marks to persuade SOE—not only a bureaucracy but a military bureaucracy— that the poem codes had to be replaced by his silks...
...Allied intelligence had discovered that Germany was obtaining "heavy water," used in the production of atomic weapons, from a plant in Norway...
...As any book on covert operations must, this one offers many stories about the individual agents too...
...SOE enthusiasm for them mounted accordingly...
...The Germans eventually sent a message to SOE in plain language gloating over their triumph...
...It has little respect for SOE as an institution or for authority in general...
...He visited Marks, who writes: "I waited until his footsteps had shuffled away, and was then violently sick on behalf of mankind...
...So were the agents, who had cyanide to swallow if captured, though few did...
...For that reason, I compared it to the standard history, M.R.D...
...Between Silk and Cyanide provides ammunition for both critics and supporters of covert action...
...Although Marks writes in apicaresque vein, and there is no way to determine if memory has played him false, the broad outlines of his account conform to the picture drawn by Foot...
...Foot holds orthodox views and rates SOE much more highly...
...Yet, congruencies between Marks and Foot suggest that the leap is not great, and probably results from Marks having reorganized the messiness of real life into dramatic narrative...
...Whatever its degree of poetic license, his story is gripping...
...When Tommy returned to England he looked like an old man...
...Marks, whose father was the proprietor of Marks & Co., the famous rare books shop at 84 Charing Cross Road, was a brash youth—and, as Between Silk and Cyanide reveals, remains brash still...
...She was executed, of course...
...Between Silk and Cyanide is essential reading, not just for students of secret warfare, but for everyone who values the human spirit and the power of a writer to bear witness to it...
...Most were captured by the Germans and, despite being in uniform, immediately shot...
...The organization operated all over the world, and agents were controlled by country sections, usually designated by the first letter of the state in question...
...They could also be transmitted in a much shorter time than the poem codes, and would put an end to indecipherables...
...Unfortunately for SOE, it was using the same codes at the time...
...SOE liked the system because the keys were not written down, and this was believed to increase their security...
...The whole affair was a catastrophe for SOE...
...But in 1942, as a very young man, he was made head of agent codes at the supersecret, and now legendary, Special Operations Executive (SOE...
...Questions of temperament aside, this is certainly related to the fact that one wrote as a historian, the other as an insider...
...Marks' book betrays attitudes and beliefs quite unlike Foot's...
...Taking advantage of this sequence of events, and of double agents (nationals in German pay who pretended to be resistance fighters were plentiful), the Germans were able to blow SOE's network in Holland without ? section's knowledge...
...This and much else was accomplished despite the Allied high command's distrust of Charles de Gaulle, an infuriating attitude to Marks, who cared nothing for the politics involved and did all he could to meet the coding needs of the Free French...
...All 10 escaped to Sweden...
...Despite the diverting quality of his book, Marks never forgets that in the most exciting years of his life he was also in the midst of death...
...As for the details that abound in his account, they must be taken on faith...
...SOE then parachuted in six agents who linked up with four surviving commandos and destroyed the plant...
...Lightheartedness only goes so far...
...One concerns Noor InayatKhan, code-named Madeleine, the daughter of an Indian prince and religious cult leader...
...Of the British Chiefs of Staff, SOE's lords and masters, Marks writes: "This formidable body—accustomed to losing its battles by conventional means—didn't share Churchill's enthusiasm for irregular warfare...
...The poem codes, however, were easily broken...
...Other evidence accumulated as well, but Marks, who despite the critical importance of his work was low in SOE's hierarchy, could never persuade his seniors that ? section was worse than useless...
...In addition, poembasedmessages were hard to encode, leading to mistakes...
...A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II" Today Leo Marks is a screenwriter and memoirist...
...Even then it wrongly suspected that the two men were double agents, and imprisoned both for months...
...Marks has a good deal...
...Their keys could be imprinted on silk strips— hence the title—and burned after use...
...section was ruined because in late 1941 an MI6 agent in the Netherlands was captured with a large number of back messages, enabling the Germans to unravel MI6's cipher system...
...Using torture and trickery, German counterintelligence was often able to get the keys from captives and turn them to its own use...
...Despite the grim subject, it includes wonderful comic turns and witty asides...
...Foot's 1984 volume SOE: An Outline History of the Special Operations Executive, 1940-1946...
...Between Silk and Cyanide reads like a novel, complete with lengthy remembered conversations that took place more than half a century ago...
...Thanks in considerable measure to this effort, the French resistance movement is credited with derailing over 1,000 German troop trains, paralyzing scores of railroad yards, and effectively delaying the arrival of the crack Das Reich division in Normandy...
...It was not until late in 1943 when two captured ? section agents (most of the rest had been shot) escaped to Switzerland, and ultimately to England, that SOE began to have doubts...
...In contrast, Forrest Frederick "Tommy" Yeo-Thomas, a fearless leader in the field and Marks' closest SOE friend, survived...
...Marks first suspected that SOE's agents had been caught because, although the poem codes were still in use, indecipherables stopped arriving fromHolland: Messages became suspiciously perfect...
Vol. 82 • June 1999 • No. 7
