Customer Reviews

Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945

5 star:		(68)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

First off I need to say that this was a fun read. The book was entertaining and informative. The author, Leo Marks, then in his early twenties, writes about his experiences as head of the British code section for the group who devised, sent and received, and translated codes for the men and women who went into Nazi occupied Western Europe to spy.

Marks, a man who is now nearly 80, should be commended for putting down this rare piece of history in writing, as most of the records of the London code group have long since been destroyed, his memory is all we have.

Ok, now this is a strange book. There is no doubt that is was written by Marks himself as no ghost writer could have concocted such a weirdly written text. It's annoying at first but one soon becomes used to it. For example, when describing a briefing he gave to a somewhat hostile audience:

"Mounting a mile long platform an inch at a time, I confronted a large Nubian with crossed arms, which turned out to be a blackboard. He had colored chalk chalks on his person where lesser men had testicles, and I wrote my messages on his chest in block capitals which were twice their normal size as I had half my normal confidence."

We have smiles parachuting from his eyes to his lips; he remembers the excitement and thrill of using the same loo that Churchill used; he remembers and recalls the figures (nothing to do with coding) of many of the women who he writes about. (He is a man of the 40's!) There is a gem on nearly every page. No ghost writer could ever concoct this menagerie.

We do learn a lot about the coding business, especially in making the codes. We learn about the men and women who volunteered to spy, organize, and become part of the Resistance. Who used the codes and their wireless sets to send back information. A daring-do occupation as most of these agents were quickly captured and executed by the Nazis. Or as Marks might say, "They had the life expectancy of a crew in a yellow polka-dotted tank in combat."

We learn that they fingerprinted the agent's Morse code keying, as each had their own peculiar style, and this could be a tip off if the the agent had been captured and Nazis had broken the code and were doing the keying.

Most books on this subject concentrate on the breaking of codes. We also learn some of the tricks of the espionage trade. There are quips about lethal toilet paper, (scatology is his thing!) and of agents blithely being sent in when some higher ups in London knew the cover had been blown and Nazis would likely be the greeting party.

Like any memoir that creates living and breathing scenes from events over half a century ago, it is hard to imagine that the writer could remember each frown, shrug of the shoulder, or other parts of the scene in such vivid detail. We'll write it off as poetic license.

It is a very personal book, made even more so by Marks "distinctive" style. It's a good read and I give it 4 stars, taking one away for slightly annoying writing style.

First I must say this: if you have any interest in the interaction between, on the one hand, people willing to sacrifice themselves for their beliefs and their country, and on the other, office-political self-interest, read this book if you can. As an eye-opener, it bitterly counter-echoes Macaulay's "None were for the party, all were for the state." Irrespective of anybody's opinion, adverse or otherwise, read it if you want unusual material on several subjects, including Giske's masterful exploitation of his penetration of the WWII Dutch resistance. Read it also if you simply are interested in cryptology, the history of cryptology or the development of cryptology (or of cryptologists). Read it if you want a vivid portrayal of the fog of war as seen from the back room, the frustration, the obsession, the pressures, the fear and the grief. Prepare yourself to control your blood pressure if you have views (from EITHER perspective) on the subject of boffin versus boss. The book is a primary and secondary document of great interest.

"Between silk and cyanide" includes plenty of humour of all shades, mainly dark, but don't read it for fun unless you are totally insensitive; it deals with harrowing events in harrowing times and I found it very upsetting on several levels. It would be wasteful to read it in a hurry just because you are a fast reader. This is a labyrinth of a book and there are many mazes of twisty little passages, all alike, that you very likely will miss if you are not careful. Heaven knows how many I myself skated over in my innocence.

This is a large book, but that is not why it is not to be read at a sitting. Nor is the reason that it is hard to read; I had to stop repeatedly to rest and to digest (or recover from) the situations and implications described. I am not so sure how well I like the style, but it impressed me as true to life. It includes a great deal of oral boffinese, not the technospeak, but the throw-away witticisms that bubble up from the depths of overactive or overwrought minds. Boffins are not supposed to laugh at them because they understand them and non-boffins rarely do because they seldom enjoy them when they do understand them. The problem is that such wit is more irritating in the written than the oral medium. After all, most of such cracks are tasteless or trivial. In other respects the writing itself is clear, natural, and far more literate than most wartime reminiscences. Mind you, Marks, intelligent and compelling as he is, is no John Masters or R. V. Jones, but then, comparison with such would set unrealistic standards for anyone. Be all that as it may, the sheer tragedy of the times repeatedly yielded nightmares painful to a reader conditioned to quips. "... I found myself staring into eyes full of dead pilots." If you really want to understand the intensity of the hurt or the nausea of such remarks, read the book.

On technical and historical matters also, this book is of interest at several levels. On one hand it repeatedly amazes one with the brilliance of some the work they did, and on the other it leaves one breathless at some of the things they apparently struggled to achieve. To anyone with modern computer experience, the idea of having difficulty in designing a letter-based one time pad surely must be totally bemusing; am I too blasé because of long occupational exposure to the concept of arbitrary radix arithmetic? I am not stupid enough to think that I would have done any better in their place at that time, but I still do not quite know what to make of this. Several other cryptographic inventions discussed (but not all) are pretty trivial in terms of information theory, which is puzzling in the light of the highly non-trivial minds that are generally known to have been employed in the field at that time. Also, there are non-cryptographic technical details that I should have loved to discuss. For example, in a period of desperate austerity the insistence on printing agents' reference material on silk puzzles me. The justification was that silk fabric was easy to burn and to conceal in clothing. I should have thought that treating rayon or even very fine cotton with nitrocellulose would have been cheaper and more effective.

But I don't know the real-life situation. I wish I did.

But not at first hand, thank you.

Marks himself was an unusual, brash, understandably not very modest, and clearly insecure young man, and he conveys his unusualness with a clinical wryness that spares neither himself nor anyone else. He is too skilled to leave me convinced that he is artless in every word he writes about himself, his favourites or his unfavourites, but if his story is substantially imaginary, this book is one of the greatest works of art of the twentieth century. If you disagree, try reading any (and I mean ANY) fictional blockbuster of comparable size and themes, whether historical romances or hard fiction, and try to find one that carries anything like the same conviction. Don't hurry to call me to compare notes. For my part I accept the book at face value as reminiscences from a retentive memory, supported by notes, slanted by personal perspective, and eroded by time. One can hardly demand better than that, especially in the light of the nauseating closing chapters, the loss of history and the closing in of the janitors and the of the vultures and parasites after the fray. As I read it, the book is a striking work dealing with arresting material, and it is absorbing, though heartbreaking, material to read.

In the official history of the Special Operations Executive, "SOE in France" published in 1966 with amendments in 1968, Mr. Marks on page 241 is described as "The philosophically-minded Mr. Marks, head of the deciphering section ...." and he was all of 23 years old. I am not directly or indirectly related to Mr. Marks and would be delighted to spend any afternoon with him at my local Bistro. Even though I deplore cigars, if he is still smoking, I would make the proper arrangements. I just returned from Europe and read "Between Silk and Cyanide" over the Atlantic. I couldn't put the book down. My first mission on returning was to check today's NY Times Book Review for the listing of best sellers. I could not believe that this epic failed to make the list. By the way, Mr. Marks, if you read this, my security code is "Bill" Williams.

Virtually everyone agrees that this is a brilliant book, but its particular attractiveness to me was in its idiosyncratic style. The author seems to have remained a schoolboy all his life (lucky man!) He cannot resist making a joke, if even the slightest of oportunities arises, and this appears, at first, to disrupt the straight-forward narrative. It takes some effort to get into his world, and to recognize his varieties of humour; to recognize also how he often laughs becasue he quite deperately wants to cry. Once one gets into his rhythm, however, it is his distinctive style that lingers and fascinates.

Actually, I did not want to write all this at all! Others have described the manifold virtues of the book, and done so better than I ever shall. I just wanted to answer one particular criticism of the book. Several reviewers have said that the cryptography, at the heart of the book, is not clearly enough presented, and that things have been glossed over.They say that they could not learn the techniques well enough to actually use. This is quite true, but Marks may not be the one to blame. Apparently, he wrote the book 10 years before it was published. Its publication had been blocked, I am given to believe, by the pleadings under the Official Secrets Act;various changes had to be made in order to make it eventually publishable. I am convinced that this is the proximate cause of the 'glossing over". He almost says so in a couple of places in the book.
Clearly, some of his 60-years old techniques are still worth keeping secret, even in this age in which comnputers dominate crytography.

Let me say, in passing, that I was in tears on reading his account of his 'final-briefing' of the most remarkable woman of them all: Violette Szabo. He too seems to have sensed her specialness,because he gave her his most special poem for her personal poem-code. I urge everyone to read Carve Her Name With Pride, and also her other biography.

I came across Marks' book at the Imperial War Museum in London. I have a fascination of all things World WarII and loved this book. I too devoured during the trans-atlantic flight home. As an American History teacher, I intend to use Mr. Marks book as an introduction to codes during my World War II unit. This is one of the best books I have read since "The Magicians War" by David Fisher (it chronicals the effors of Oscar Maskelyne to provide camoflauge for the British Army in Northern Africa).

The science of codebreaking and codemaking is usually a subject guaranteed to glaze the eyes of all but the most devoted. Technical details abound and the reader is led through lots of alphabet soup.

Usually.

Not this time. The codebreakers of WW2 were an eccentric lot, it turns out, all brilliant, many fatally flawed. Leo Marks (son of the bookseller who established the famous 84 Charing Cross Road shop) is no exception. Brilliant.

And flawed in that he had a deep attachment to the agents sent overseas, often with totally inadequate codes. This is the story of his long hours, days and years spent in helping them and improving the codes. The difference in codes was quite literally between life and death, often with hideous torture intervening.

When I say "flawed", I mean that he wasn't the sort of cog-in-the-machine toe-the-line public servant fighting the war from a comfy chair. He bucked the system and was on the constant verge of dismissal or promotion. Unconventional to a fault. Always with one distant eye on agents deep in Occupied Europe, operating with radio sets the size of suitcases, tapping out messages in Morse while German direection-finding vans zeroed in on them.

And his unconventional book is a delight, a joy to read. It is more than well written, it is a work of literature in its own right. Quite simply, it is as brilliant as its author.

But be warned, dear reader. You will need a handkerchief to mop up the tears. Sometimes from laughter, sometimes from sadness. This is a book that will insert probes into the deepest parts of your mind and tickle the emotion centres, sometimes pleasure and pain at once. I can't really describe it, but this book somehow joins your subconscious mind to the author's and you share his thoughts in a way that is both intimate and completely natural. I have never met another book that comes close.

There's enough detail to satisfy those with an interest in codes, the story is well told, it is full of fascinating characters, fraught with tension all the way through, but the joy of reading this book is in the words and sentences. Puns and wordplay abound. I am on the last pages even as I write these words, but though I have boxes of books, good books, excellent books to read, I shall reread this one again immediately.

And enjoy it all the more, I am sure.

Leo Marks, I wish you had written this book decades ago, and followed it up with many more in the same vein.

Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks is a brilliant autobiography of a master cryptographer in the Secret Operations Executive (SOE) of Great Britain during WWII. Written over 50 years after the war, Marks recounts in a lively and often self-deprecating narrative the importance of cypher revolutions that he, at the age of 22, invented. This is a deeply personal account that makes little attempt to place in context the greater role of the SOE and its operations during the War. However Marks succeeds by relating his interactions with his department heads, his work force, Generals and visitors of all flavors, and most intimately with the agents he briefed before their flight to the Continent.

The SOE was created by direct authorization from PM Winston Churchill to wage "an ungentlemanly war." The SOE established webs of networks throughout Nazi-occupied Europe to run clandestine agents both recruited in place and dropped in by air from England. The networks communicated by wireless for London to hear. But, as all knew, the Nazis were listening as well and had the power of crack cryptographic units to break the cyphers and direction-finding equipment in the field to route out the wireless operators. Most agents were ultimately captured.

Marks, in the Signals division of the SOE, became a practical cryptographer. The SOE had inherited the well-established poem code where a message is encrypted through a unique key poem that the agent puts to memory. There were several fatal drawbacks to this code. After sufficient traffic passed on the same poem, a Nazi cryptoanalysist could mathematically reconstruct the poem itself, opening all back and future traffic to direct reading. More commonly, the Nazis would torture the poems out of agents. To counter the torture of agents, and reduce the risk of capture in the first place, Marks invented worked-out keys (WOKs), letter one-top pads (LOPs), memory one-top pads (MOPs), and host of new codes to enable agents to never remember their cypher keys due to their randomness and to transmit messages with very short length. These cyphers were ultimately adopted through the SOE and later most all clandestine agencies.

The power of Marks' account derives from his personal contacts with the SOE agents he briefed on codes before they were dropped onto the Continent. Being the head of codes, and the undisputed master of breaking "indecipherables", Marks found himself in the position of reading top-secret traffic on the progress and/or capture of these brave agents. He discovered on his own through cryptographic methods that nearly all Holland agents had been captured by 1943. He followed the progress of the heroic Yeo-Thomas through Paris and the fateful Noor Inayat Kahn and Violette Szabo. And he learned the tragedies many agents met.

One overwhelming trait of this book is its hilarity. No doubt that Marks has had time to bring out the absurdity of so many of the events that he recounts which a lesser author would suppress. Certainly much of this book reads like a screen play. However, I caution the reader to errantly consider this book a Catch-22 because the facts relating to the disposition of various agents import the full horror of the War and the barbarianism of the Nazis. Marks held the key to protecting the life of the SOE agents in particular and later clandestine agents throughout the globe by creating new, fast, fault-free, and unbreakable codes which enabled the agents to remain in contact but not be routed out by easedroppers and enemy cryptographic resources. In this position he excelled beyond measure, but his narrative never presumes to reward himself for his brilliance. I thank him for providing us with his remarkable account.

I am an avid reader of codebooks and I found this book the most down to earth book yet on WWII English codebreakers. Not so much based on Bletchley Park (as most of the codebreaker books about Britain), this book gives an intriguing insider's look into the day-to-day happenings and life of a codebreaker. It isn't always simple codebreaking and beating the enemy - its bureaucracy and sometimes the enemy is within your agency! This is not the book to read if you want precise historical analysis, it is more a supplementary book after you have read more academic books on the subject (I recommend Singh's "Codebreakers"). This book can make you laugh outloud (like I did on the trans-pacific plane ride) as well as make you almost cry at times. Leo Marks does a great job at keeping the story realistic-feeling - this is not a James Bond book.

A history of war at it's most secret and people at their most selfless, yet told with an eclectic sense of humor. The author has painted wonderful word pictures of the behind-the-scenes war, with the British often as much at war with each other as with the Germans. It reads like a spy thriller, yet struck me through with the poignant sketches of ordinary (and painfully young) individuals who placed themselves is such extraordinary danger in the occupied countries, and paid such a grisly price in the end, names such as Odette and Madeline, and Mark's beloved Tommy. He pays tribute to the thousands who worked tirelessly supporting these agents, thousands who could never discuss their work, and who would remain unsung but for this story.

While the entire code operation story was fascinating, and will serve as a record of this most remarkable group (almost all records of SOE from this time no longer exist), the real service of this book is to the memory of those who served in silence, of those who came of age in war, and those who never lived to see beyond it.

Fifty years after the fact a superb writer describes his role in the "secret war" - eloquently juxtaposing whimsy, frustration, and grief interspersed with useful tutorials on code making and code breaking. It's also an inspiring homily about the ability of a thoroughly undisciplined individualist to thrive in an unlikely military setting. Self-distracted to the point of failing the training course for Bletchley Park, Marks was fobbed off on the Special Operations Executive (SOE), where his creativity bloomed. Within two years he was developing secure codes and implementing rational communication procedures for a multitude of Allied special operations forces. The author notes in passing (while rushing toward the final pages of his book) that many of the facts about the day-to-day activities of the SOE have been successfully obscured by its bitter bureaucratic rival, the Secret Intelligence Service, to whom SOE's records were unwisely entrusted when the organization was disbanded after the war. There are almost no books about which I could truly say, "I couldn't put it down," but this is one of them.