The masterspy of Acton town
by Luke Jennings
Once again, Leo Marks takes me through the details of encoding the messages
that I will transmit to London from enemy-occupied France. On the desk in
front of me are two squares of silk, printed with thousands of tiny letters.
These, which I will conceal in my clothing, are my LOP (letter one-time
pad), and my agent's key. After transmitting each message, Marks explains,
I must cut away the relevant section of silk from the LOP and burn it. Even
if it is next to impossible - if I am transmitting in the dark, say, and
the German foot-patrols and detector-cars are closing in on me, and I am
terrified almost to the point of unreason - I must still cut away and burn
the used part of the LOP. That way, even if I am caught with my silks,
the enemy will not be able to decode my back-traffic.
'Understood?' asks Marks. I nod, and we move on to security checks. These
are the letters which I must include in my message to indicate that I am
not transmitting under duress. 'They will torture you for your security
checks,' says Marks quietly, 'and you will lie. Every time they stop beating
you, you will give them a different answer. You will lie, and you will lie,
and you will lie, and you will lie...'
We are play-acting, of course, but Marks's eyes on me are rapt and unblinking
as those of a starling. The silks are real enough, too, even though they
are now more than 50 years old. Every one was created for a real agent dropped
behind enemy lines in the Second World War. 'Every code,' says Marks, 'has
a human face.'
Marks, a cryptographer of outstanding brilliance, was the code-master of
the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the department responsible for training,
placing and communicating with British secret agents in the Second World
War. He briefed and provided codes for hundreds of men and women who were
planted behind enemy lines, including such legendary names as Violette Szabo
(codename 'Louise') and Frederick Yeo-Thomas ('The White Rabbit'). After
the war, Marks worked briefly for SIS (the Secret Intelligence Service,
later known as MI6), and then turned his back on the secret world to become
a writer of plays and filmscripts. Late last year, however, after ten years
reliving his time at SOE, Marks published his memoirs entitled Between Silk
and Cyanide. More than half a century has passed since the events described
in the book, but Marks still encountered 'acute opposition' to his writing
it. Almost all of his official war reports, he discovered, had been shredded
as too damaging to the reputation of the secret services. Only the encouragement
of a former colleague, Jacob Astor of the SAS, persuaded him to undertake
the task. 'If you don't write the story,' Astor told him, 'nobody will.'
And so he wrote it. And here, in consequence, am I, sitting in Marks's pleasantly
cluttered drawing-room in Acton, being initiated into the mysteries of double-transposition
coding. Marks, now 78, is a warm, solicitous and highly enigmatic man, in
whom, despite a broad anarchic streak, the habit of secrecy is deeply engrained.
When I ask him if he has had anything to do with the secret services since
his official departure in 1946 he gravely draws my attention to a plate
of smoked salmon sandwiches. 'Let's just say,' he murmurs, steepling his
fingers, 'that my advice has occasionally been sought.' The room is dominated
by a portrait of Vera Atkins (of SOE's French section) painted by Marks's
wife Elena. When they married in 1965, Elena had no idea of her husband's
secret background. It was only when they went to a dinner at the Special
Forces Club and a total stranger drew her aside and whispered, 'Of course
you know that you've married a genius,' that she suspected that there might
be more to Marks's past than scriptwriting.
I first heard the name Leo Marks in connection with Michael Powell's film
Peeping Tom. The film, which Marks wrote, is a sympathetic portrait of a
voyeuristic psychopath. Its central character (named Mark Lewis) is compiling
a 'documentary of fear', and films his victims' terror as he kills them.
At the time of its release in 1960, the film provoked a critical uproar
which destroyed Powell's career. In recent years, however, the piece has
been reappraised, and in 1994 the critic Dilys Powell recanted her earlier
damning of the film and described Peeping Tom as 'a masterpiece'. It is
a bizarre and unsettling work, and unsurprisingly, given Marks's authorship,
a highly cryptic one. There are clues embedded in the script as to the central
character's true motivation and nature, but these must be decoded frame
by frame and word by word before they can be understood.
Perhaps the best key to an understanding of Peeping Tom is Between Silk
and Cyanide. At SOE Marks lived in an atmosphere that was rank with fear.
'Every briefing room,' he says, 'was full of it.' Even the most courageous
agents knew that their life expectancy in the field was not much more than
a month, and that they would be tortured when caught. Part of Marks's job
was to observe their state, to watch and assess them as they went through
the coding routines and the security checks one last time. He became a connoisseur
of fear. 'Peeping Tom,' he tells me, 'was born in those briefing rooms.
I became convinced that all cryptographers are basically voyeurs.' The director
Martin Scorsese is a great fan and admirer of Peeping Tom. In his 1988 film
The Last Temptation of Christ he cast Marks as the voice of the devil.
And there is something lethal about Marks, as there is with all those who
fought the Nazis 'by all means necessary'. One of the silks Marks shows
me belonged to an agent codenamed Periwig. Periwig was a captured German
officer named Schiller, a double agent whom SOE dropped into Germany as
part of a deception campaign. For the ruse to work, it was necessary that
Periwig should be discovered dead, having apparently broken his neck when
his parachute failed to open. Marks, 23 at the time, briefed Periwig exhaustively
in order that the agent should suspect nothing. Marks knew what was going
to happen to him, however, and the briefing was not easy. 'He was a very
nice man,' he remembers. 'But then you become case-hardened. If you brief
an agent on the Tuesday and three days later his eyes are taken out with
a fork, as happened with one of our people, then you do become case-hardened.'
Marks, who describes himself as 'a spoilt Jewish only child', discovered
his talent for cryptography 70 years ago. His father was the owner of 84
Charing Cross Road, the bookshop which would be made famous by Helene Hanff's
best-seller, and at the age of eight, out of sheer intellectual curiosity,
Marks broke his father's elaborate pricing code. Four years later, having
discovered that different schools were set the same Common Entrance exams
at different times, he set up an inter-school cheating network. As a result,
he won a place at St Paul's, and was only saved from being expelled when
his real academic level was discovered because the headmaster was a customer
of 84 Charing Cross Road. After St Paul's, Marks applied to the code-breaking
school at Bletchley Park, but was refused on the grounds of facetiousness
and unorthodoxy and sent to the fledgling SOE in Baker Street.
At SOE, which he describes as 'pitted and pockmarked with improbable people
doing implausible things for imponderable purposes and succeeding by coincidence',
Marks immediately spotted two fatal flaws in the system. The first was that
agents were using poems as the basis for codes, and since these poems were
memorised, agents could be tortured to reveal them. In many cases, the poems
were so well known that all the enemy decoders had to do was break a few
words and then turn to The Dragon Book of Verse. Shakespeare, Keats and
Tennyson were particularly popular. 'SOE's code-poems helped educate the
Germans in English literature,' Marks tells me. 'But they weren't much use
for anything else. Watch!' Taking a pen, he shows me how a poem-coded message
of less than 100 characters is swiftly reducible to a series of simple anagrams.
His solution to the problem was to create a code-system that changed with
each message and could not possibly be remembered by the agent. The result,
after some refinement, was the cut-away silk LOP, variations on which would
continue to be used by intelligence agencies throughout the Cold War. Poems
continued to be memorised by agents, but only for use in emergencies or
if their silks were lost. Marks also made sure that code-poems were either
severely doctored from their original form or written by himself. No graduate
of Heidelberg University, no matter how well-read in English verse, would
be familiar with the words: 'Tickle my wallypad/Tongue my zonker/And make
an oak tree/Out of a conker.'
The second flaw in the SOE system was the issue of 'indecipherables'. These
were incoming messages which had been miscoded, usually as a result of the
agent's stress, and so could not be read. Pre-Marks the response had always
been an order to re-send the original message. Recognising that this extra
traffic greatly endangered agents' lives, Marks decided that the system
had to change. 'I decided that there must be no such thing as an indecipherable
that, however long it took us, we would break every one.' And he did so.
He set up a 400-strong decoding 'factory' in Baker Street, staffed for the
most part by young women recruited from FANY (the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry),
and sooner or later - sometimes after tens of thousands of attempts - all
the indecipherables yielded. 'I'd even work on them during my sleep,' Marks
remembers. 'That sense of urgency has never left me.'
Working with the FANY decoders led Marks to what he describes as 'the major
discovery of the war'. The FANYs, he noticed, were occasionally and uncharacteristically
erratic in their work, and this caused acute difficulties to agents in the
field. In an attempt to solve the problem, Marks took to noting the dates
when mistakes were made by each decoder, and discovered that a pattern emerged.
Turning to Sigmund Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Marks
read that most carelessness was triggered by subconscious sexual frustration.
'If this were true of the girls,' Marks mused, 'I must put my country first
and end their frustration.' He confided in the decoders' personnel officer,
a redoubtable FANY named Captain Henderson, who patiently and at some length
explained to Marks that women had periods - a fact of which, up to that
moment, Marks had been blithely ignorant. 'I was amazed,' says Marks. 'I
wanted to hold a national period conference, and compare notes with the
people at Bletchley.' Sternly, Captain Henderson informed him that this
was a private matter, and one which the FANYs would not wish discussed.
Marks's nemesis was a major in the German Abwehr named Giskes. A subtle
and experienced intelligence officer, Giskes was responsible for counter-espionage
in occupied Holland, and Marks became increasingly convinced that he had
penetrated SOE's Dutch network. Agents' messages were transmitted to London
without security checks, and even more revealingly, no 'indeciph-erables'
were received for months on end. To Marks, already suspicious of the Dutch
network, this lack of errors indicated that the messages were being transmitted
by agents in captivity (agents at large tended to make mistakes as a result
of the desperate haste in which they had to work). Marks confided his fears
to his superiors on several occasions but was disregarded. As agents continued
to be dropped into Holland, a battle of wits developed between Marks and
his German counterpart. 'He shared my office for a minimum of 20 hours a
day,' remembers Marks. 'He was a man of integrity, subtlety and very substantial
skill.' Marks laid cryptographic traps for Giskes, forcing the German to
reveal his hand, but without official support there was very little Marks
could do but watch as agent after agent was sent in. By the end of what
Giskes and his Abwehr colleagues called the 'Englandspiel' (the match against
England), 51 SOE and nine SIS agents were in captivity. Almost all were
executed, and Marks later discovered that many of his SOE colleagues had
shared his conviction that the network had been blown.
At the end of the war an attempt was made to recruit Marks into SIS. He
spent a few months in the basement of its Curzon Street HQ, writing up the
details of SOE's code war (the report, hundreds of pages long, was later
shredded) but found the SIS atmosphere 'horrendous'. He never took over
the running of 84 Charing Cross Road, as his father had wished. 'When you've
briefed agents like Yeo-Thomas and Knut Haugland,' he tells me wryly, 'selling
rare books at inflated prices loses its attraction.' Marks's father died
in 1968, and 84 Charing Cross Road, a victim of redevelopment, closed in
the early Seventies. By then, Marks was fully engaged in the very different
world of showbusiness: he was developing further scripts for Michael Powell,
was friendly with the likes of the Boulting Brothers, and was exploring
the possibilities of television.
Over the course of the half-century since the end of the war, Marks has
found himself torn between the urge to remember events at Baker Street and
the urge to forget them. Writing his memoirs has not been easy. His wife,
he admits, has endured ten years of hell as he has relived the anguish of
his time at SOE. 'When he was writing,' says Elena, 'it was as if I was
alone in the flat.' With the book published, however, Marks can at last
turn his attention to other things. He is considering writing a novel. If
he does so, and Marks has a habit of achieving the things he sets his mind
to, we can count on it being a work of some complexity.
Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks is published by HarperCollins, 19.99.
Peeping Tom screenplay by Leo Marks is published by Faber and Faber, 8.99.
(c) Associated Newspapers Ltd., 08 January 1999
This Is London
