Between Silk and Cyanide Story of SOE's Code War

 

A cryptographer and then an award-winning scriptwriter, Leo Marks is credited by Roosevelt as having shortened the war by at least three months due to the innovations he devised in signals intelligence saving countless lives. This text reveals the code operations of SOE during the war.

Twenty-three is awfully young to find yourself with the power of life and death...Leo Marks failed the examination to go and work on codes at Bletchley by being just too good and too much of a smart aleck. Instead, he was imposed on a not entirely willing Special Operations Executive (SOE) to teach coding to agents dropped into Europe and to decode the sometimes indecipherable messages they sent back at great risk to their lives. His speeches to his staff on the mortal danger of slowness or carelessness are classics of guilt-tripping. Absence of mistakes made him suspect that the Germans had captured SOE's Dutch agents--his youth and personality meant that his superiors were slow to believe him. In his spare time, he revolutionized cryptography by inventing one-time-only pads, and wrote poems for agents to use as keys--including the poem associated with Violette Szabo, "Odette".

Leo Marks
Hardcover with d/w 416 pages HarperCollins 1998 1st Ed

Fine/Vg

Book Code:  SA0053