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

~ (Author) "In January 1942 I was escorted to the war by my parents in case I couldn't find it or met with an accident on the..." (more)
Key Phrases: country section heads, silk codes, next sked, Duke Street, Free French, Baker Street (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

At the age of 8, Leo Marks discovered the great game of code-making and -breaking in his father's London bookshop, thanks to a first edition of Poe's The Gold-Bug. At 23, as World War II was being played out in earnest, he hoped to use his strengths for the Allies. But Marks's urgent, witty memoir, Between Silk and Cyanide, begins with his failure to get into British Intelligence's cryptographic department. As everyone else on his course heads off to Bletchley Park ("the promised land"), he is sent to what his sergeant terms "some potty outfit in Baker Street, an open house for misfits." In fact, the Special Operations Executive's mandate was, in Churchill's stirring phrase, to "Set Europe Ablaze," and Marks's was to monitor code security so that agents could could report back as safely as possible. When he arrived, the common wisdom was that it was easiest for men and women in the field to memorize and use well-known poems.

Unfortunately, since the Germans had equal access to the classics--"Reference books," Marks quips, "are jackboots when used by cryptographers"--Marks thought agents should write their own poems (or use his) instead, several of which are cheerily obscene. After all, no son or daughter of the Fatherland could ever know the rest of a verse that began "Is de Gaulle's prick / Twelve inches thick," and continued on in a similar, shall we say, vein. But Marks soon felt that original doggerel was just as dangerous, since even slight misspellings could render messages indecipherable and risk agents' lives. His first solution? WOKs (worked-out keys) printed on silk. An operative would use one key, send the message, and immediately tear off the strip. Marks had a hard time proving that swaths of silk would save his people from swallowing their "optional extra," a cyanide pill. His efforts were dead serious, but often landed him in comic terrain.

In one of the book's great set pieces, Marks visits Colonel Wills--surely the model for Ian Fleming's Q--in order to sort out the best ways to print his code keys. Before solving this minor problem (invisible ink!), Wills showed Marks several new projects--one of which involves an exotic array of dung, courtesy of the London Zoo. This gifted gadgetmeister planned to model life-sized reproductions of these droppings and pack them with explosives, personalized for all parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. "Once trodden on or driven over (hopefully by the enemy) the whole lot would go off with a series of explosions even more violent than the ones which had produced it," Marks explains.

Despite such larky sentences and sections, the author never loses sight of the importance of his vocation, and Between Silk and Cyanide is as elegiac as it is engaging. Marks knows when to cut the laugh track, particularly as his book becomes a despairing record of agents blown--lost to torture, prison, the camps, and execution. Readers will never forget the valor of Violette Szabo, Noor Inayat Kahn, and the White Rabbit himself, Flight Lieutenant Yeo-Thomas. Poem-cracking, as Marks again and again makes clear, was far more than a parlor game. --Kerry Fried --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

A well-paced war diary, Markss memoir traces the strategically vital creation of secure codes for Allied agents operating in Nazi-occupied territories. Marks was in his early 20s during the war, a civilian with military rank in Britains elite Special Operations Executive, a prodigy immersed in a pasty world of subterranean old men. Though Marks rarely ventured out of his basement office, his book builds a delicate tension as he describes working frantically to develop codes that the Nazis could neither crack nor imitate, as they did with the standard Allied poem code. Markss contributions to such historically significant events as the destruction of Norsk Hydro, the heavy water plant on which the Germans pinned their hopes for atomic weapons, and to the concealment of preparations for D-Day, are effectively balanced against such workaday concerns as finding quantities of silk onto which codes could be photographed. Although Markss account is more anecdotal than researched, his unique position as chief developer of Britains secure communications, along with an impishness that led him to break De Gaulles secret French code (off-limits to the non-French Allies) or rib his older compatriots (Davies nodded so hard he almost lost a jowl) give his book an authoritative and laconic punch.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1st Touchstone Ed edition (September 12, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 068486780X
• ISBN-13: 978-0684867809
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (98 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #241,064 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Making codes in WWI, June 8, 2000

By	Richard S. Sullivan (Santa Fe, New Mexico) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945 (Hardcover)

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.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Something new among the WWII babble, March 11, 2004

By	Jon Richfield (Western Cape, South Africa) - See all my reviews

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.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Masterpiece, October 31, 1999

By	JEROME R. ROSENBERG ([e-mail]) "jrresq" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945 (Hardcover)

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.