(no subject)
Aug. 15th, 2020 10:03 pmFor most of the past week I've been out of the city of Boston for the first time since the quarantimes began, and I spent a significant chunk of that time reading out loud from Leo Marks' Between Silk and Cyanide to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
genarti and my parents whenever any of them would sit still long enough to listen.
Between Silk and Cyanide is a memoir by Leo Marks, who in 1941 was deemed too much of an unreliable misfit to go work at Bletchley Park and as a result was instead sent to SOE to handle the cryptography of their various sabotage operations in Europe.
Some relevant facts about Leo Marks:
- he was Jewish and absolutely petrified by the prospect of facing combat
- his parents owned a moderately famous used bookstore
- after the war he went on to become a playwright and screenwriter, which means that the book is extremely entertainingly written but also one has to cast a slightly skeptical eye at some incidents of dialogue that seem perhaps slightly too cinematic for reality
- in 1941 he was 21 years old, which means that one spends a significant percentage of narrative clutching one's face and screaming "CHILD!" as, for example, in his initial interview for the position:
He began the interview by asking what my hobbies were.
"Incunabula and intercourse, sir."
It slipped out and wasn't even accurate; I'd had little experience of one and couldn't afford the other.
AN INFANT.
(Later on, he gets assigned to visit Cairo on Top Secret Codes Business and is petrified by the prospect of telling his adoring parents, who are convinced he's not capable of going across the city on his own, let alone leaving the country. "They need to have their heads examined, sending a baby to that awful place," wails Leo's Mum, of a youth currently responsible for overseeing all cryptographic traffic sent between London and SOE agents parachuted behind enemy lines.)
Anyway, immediately upon arriving at SOE headquarters, the Infant Leo becomes appalled by the lack of security and danger to the agents of the poem-based codes in use at the time, and embarks upon a one-man crusade to a.) develop better cryptographic methods and b.) convince his superiors that resources ought to be devoted to them. His methodology is often very funny and extremely twenty-one-years-old of him -- at one point, for example, he comes up with a cunning plan to force someone to read his report by marking it 'TOP SECRET,' leaving it in an unlocked drawer, and promptly reporting himself for breach of security protocols -- and you often understand all too well why Marks' superiors and coworkers are frequently furious at the obnoxious wunderkind who keeps barging into their offices and yelling that everything they're doing is wrong and bad.
With all this said, Leo's first most endearing quality as a writer is that he is not only witty and self-aware, but also more than happy to make himself the butt of the joke and admit his own shortcomings, failures, and hubris, as well as occasional highly relatable moments of slapstick. The second and far more significant one is that all his efforts are clearly driven by a profound conviction and sense of personal responsibility about the fact that bad cryptographic protocols are killing agents, and as funny as the book is much of the time, it's also very clear that Marks was and remains deeply haunted by SOE's losses. Several significant SOE figures show up over the course of the book, but some of the most space is reserved for Noor Inayat Khan, Violette Szabo, and Leo's friend F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas, all of whom were captured by the Gestapo in France. (On a lighter note, he also spends a lot of time tearing his hair out over Einar Skinnerland, whose cryptographic traffic is as sloppily coded as his clandestine achievements are heroic.)
Aside from the Ongoing Quest for Better Cryptography, the other main thread of the book is Marks' conviction that all SOE agents in Amsterdam have been captured by the Germans, based on the use of their secret security checks followed by the subsequent implausible perfection of their cryptographic traffic, and his deep frustration and panic about the fact that his superiors will neither do anything about it nor allow him to tell anybody else. The parts of the book where he talks about having to keep a professional face when providing briefings to officers that he's convinced are being dropped straight to their deaths are incredibly affecting. By the time the war ends, a now twenty-five-year-old Marks is significantly less of an infant, and deeply and understandably exhausted by both cryptography and the vicious politics of war.
(It's worth noting for the sake of independent verification that none of Marks' reports about this issue survive in the war archives, so the only source for Marks' ability to detect the deception in Amsterdam before the rest of SOE is Marks himself. Relatedly, Marks claims that the only report of his that does survive to the present day was a youthful attempt to understand cryptography through a Freudian perspective titled "Ciphers, Signals, and Sex." Given that a full chapter of the book is dedicated to one of Marks' colleagues attempting to explain the 'awkward time of the month' to him as it relates to his mostly-female codebreaking team while he makes the confused math face, one doesn't put a lot of stock in his conclusions but one does expect it to be hilarious. Alas, attempts to recover this important document have apparently failed.)
Anyway. Highly, highly recommended for anyone who's at all interested in this particular period of history -- thank you tosovay for reminding me that I've been meaning to get around to it.
genarti and my parents whenever any of them would sit still long enough to listen.Between Silk and Cyanide is a memoir by Leo Marks, who in 1941 was deemed too much of an unreliable misfit to go work at Bletchley Park and as a result was instead sent to SOE to handle the cryptography of their various sabotage operations in Europe.
Some relevant facts about Leo Marks:
- he was Jewish and absolutely petrified by the prospect of facing combat
- his parents owned a moderately famous used bookstore
- after the war he went on to become a playwright and screenwriter, which means that the book is extremely entertainingly written but also one has to cast a slightly skeptical eye at some incidents of dialogue that seem perhaps slightly too cinematic for reality
- in 1941 he was 21 years old, which means that one spends a significant percentage of narrative clutching one's face and screaming "CHILD!" as, for example, in his initial interview for the position:
He began the interview by asking what my hobbies were.
"Incunabula and intercourse, sir."
It slipped out and wasn't even accurate; I'd had little experience of one and couldn't afford the other.
AN INFANT.
(Later on, he gets assigned to visit Cairo on Top Secret Codes Business and is petrified by the prospect of telling his adoring parents, who are convinced he's not capable of going across the city on his own, let alone leaving the country. "They need to have their heads examined, sending a baby to that awful place," wails Leo's Mum, of a youth currently responsible for overseeing all cryptographic traffic sent between London and SOE agents parachuted behind enemy lines.)
Anyway, immediately upon arriving at SOE headquarters, the Infant Leo becomes appalled by the lack of security and danger to the agents of the poem-based codes in use at the time, and embarks upon a one-man crusade to a.) develop better cryptographic methods and b.) convince his superiors that resources ought to be devoted to them. His methodology is often very funny and extremely twenty-one-years-old of him -- at one point, for example, he comes up with a cunning plan to force someone to read his report by marking it 'TOP SECRET,' leaving it in an unlocked drawer, and promptly reporting himself for breach of security protocols -- and you often understand all too well why Marks' superiors and coworkers are frequently furious at the obnoxious wunderkind who keeps barging into their offices and yelling that everything they're doing is wrong and bad.
With all this said, Leo's first most endearing quality as a writer is that he is not only witty and self-aware, but also more than happy to make himself the butt of the joke and admit his own shortcomings, failures, and hubris, as well as occasional highly relatable moments of slapstick. The second and far more significant one is that all his efforts are clearly driven by a profound conviction and sense of personal responsibility about the fact that bad cryptographic protocols are killing agents, and as funny as the book is much of the time, it's also very clear that Marks was and remains deeply haunted by SOE's losses. Several significant SOE figures show up over the course of the book, but some of the most space is reserved for Noor Inayat Khan, Violette Szabo, and Leo's friend F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas, all of whom were captured by the Gestapo in France. (On a lighter note, he also spends a lot of time tearing his hair out over Einar Skinnerland, whose cryptographic traffic is as sloppily coded as his clandestine achievements are heroic.)
Aside from the Ongoing Quest for Better Cryptography, the other main thread of the book is Marks' conviction that all SOE agents in Amsterdam have been captured by the Germans, based on the use of their secret security checks followed by the subsequent implausible perfection of their cryptographic traffic, and his deep frustration and panic about the fact that his superiors will neither do anything about it nor allow him to tell anybody else. The parts of the book where he talks about having to keep a professional face when providing briefings to officers that he's convinced are being dropped straight to their deaths are incredibly affecting. By the time the war ends, a now twenty-five-year-old Marks is significantly less of an infant, and deeply and understandably exhausted by both cryptography and the vicious politics of war.
(It's worth noting for the sake of independent verification that none of Marks' reports about this issue survive in the war archives, so the only source for Marks' ability to detect the deception in Amsterdam before the rest of SOE is Marks himself. Relatedly, Marks claims that the only report of his that does survive to the present day was a youthful attempt to understand cryptography through a Freudian perspective titled "Ciphers, Signals, and Sex." Given that a full chapter of the book is dedicated to one of Marks' colleagues attempting to explain the 'awkward time of the month' to him as it relates to his mostly-female codebreaking team while he makes the confused math face, one doesn't put a lot of stock in his conclusions but one does expect it to be hilarious. Alas, attempts to recover this important document have apparently failed.)
Anyway. Highly, highly recommended for anyone who's at all interested in this particular period of history -- thank you to
sovay for reminding me that I've been meaning to get around to it.
