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

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 intere

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.

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).

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.

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 reco