A Codemaker's War

The Baker Street Code Room

The Baker Street code room, which Dansey and Owen ran with an efficiency and precision "Uncle Simon" would have envied, was essentially a main-line code room. Its function was to communicate with embassies and base stations around the world using code-books and one-time pads which provided the highest possible level of security and were cryptographically unbreakable even by Tiltman. It was the luxury end of the business.

The agents in the field had to use their codes in conditions of difficulty and danger which were unique in the history of coding. Their traffic was handled in that main-line code room by anyone available to do it. The volume of main-line traffic allowed no specialization. Each girl had to be a multi-purpose coder, able in theory to switch from main-line traffic to agents' at a moment's notice, though the system called for very different aptitudes, attitudes and disciplines.

The responsibility for both main-line and agents' codes was vested in Dansey and Owen. Each of them had an asset which was rare in SOE -- the ability to know what he was best at doing. They had repeatedly tried to persuade SOE that agents' traffic needed a cryptographer to supervise it -- and permission had finally been given to add one to the staff. His brief, as SOE conceived it, was a simple one. All he would be required to do was "keep an eye on the security of agents' traffic" -- and perhaps break one or two of the indecipherable messages which poured in from the field.

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 start that this theory was wrong, and hoped that whoever advised SOE that the poem-code was suitable for agents would try performing its paper-gymnastics in the field.

The slightest mistake in the coding, a second's lapse of concentration, would render the entire message indecipherable. Frequently as much as 20 per cent of SOE's traffic could not be decoded due to agents' errors.

Whenever SOE received an indecipherable the agent responsible was instructed to re-encode it and have it ready for his next transmission.

I was prepared to fight this malpractice by whatever means I could.

If some shit-scared wireless operator, surrounded by direction-finding cars which were after him like sniffer dogs, who lacked electric light to code by or squared paper to code on -- if that agent hadn't the right to make mistakes in his coding without being ordered to do the whole job again at the risk of his life, then we hadn't the right to call ourselves a coding department.

Surely the answer was simple? Squads of girls must be specially trained to break agents' indecipherables. Records must be kept of the mistakes agents made in training -- they might be repeating them in the field. SOE would need more coders -- and would have to compete for them in the far from open market. There must be no such thing as an agent's indecipherable.

Dansey didn't disagree with any of this. He simply pointed out a major obstacle of which I knew nothing. The name of that obstacle was Chain of Command.

All SOE's communications were under the control of the Signals directorate. Since these communications were worldwide, this empire-builder's paradise embraced main-line and agents' codes, all wireless stations, all wireless training schools, all wireless equipment -- and one or two research establishments which no one had found time to visit.

The head of the Signals conglomerate, Colonel Ozanne, was a problem to which no solution compatible with law was remotely in sight. A one-man obstacle course, the colonel was opposed to any kind of change except in his rank. He elected to concentrate on main-line communications whilst taking an "overall view" of everything else, though he often had difficulty in focusing his viewfinder, especially after lunch. His second in command, Colonel George Pollock, controlled the wireless stations, the training schools and agents' communications generally. This hierarchical structure put Dansey in the delicate position of being answerable to Ozanne for main-line codes and to Pollock for agents'.

Pollock's peacetime occupation posed problems of a special kind. He was a highly successful barrister who'd been well on his way to becoming a judge, and he used the Signals directorate as an extension of his chambers. All Dansey's requests were subjected to litigation and the verdict invariably went against him. Though Dansey never hesitated to stand up and be frequency-counted, he was in every respect outranked. The colonel disliked the untidy conveyancing which placed Dansey under his command but not under his control and had made several attempts to take agents' codes away from him, the last of which had almost succeeded.

Dansey warned me that I must do nothing which would give him an excuse to try again. "In fact," he said, "you must go very carefully until your appointment is confirmed. And, after that, old boy -- you must go more carefully still."

I managed to comply for two whole weeks.

Copyright © 1998 by Leo Marks. All rights reserved. Converted for the Web with the permission of Simon & Schuster.