In 1942, Leo Marks left
his father's famous bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road, and went off to
fight the war. He was twenty-two and soon to be recognized as a cryptographer of
genius He became head of communications at the Special Operations
Executive (SOE), where he revolutionized the codemaking techniques of
the Allies and trained some of the most famous agents dropped into
occupied Europe.
The title is derived from an incident related in the book Marks
was asked why agents in occupied Europe should have their cryptographic
material printed on silk (which was in very short supply). He summed his
reply up by saying that it was "between silk and cyanide", meaning that
it was a choice between the agent's surviving by making reliable coded
radio transmissions with the help of the printed silk, and having to
take a suicide pill. Unlike paper, which would be given away by rustling, silk would not be
detected by a casual search if it was concealed in the lining of
clothing. Many of the incidents described in the book are humorous, a major theme
is Marks' inability to convince his superiors that apparent mistakes
made in radio transmissions from agents infiltrated into Nazi-occupied Holland were prearranged duress codes. S.O.E.
management, unwilling to face the possibility that their Dutch network
was compromised, insisted that the errors were attributable to poor
operation by the recently trained Morse code operators and continued to
parachute in new agents to sites prearranged with the compromised
network This lead to their immediate capture and later execution by the
Nazis. Marks' interest in cryptography dated from reading Poe's The Gold-Bug as a child. As a boy, Leo had begun his code-breaking with that of the used book store his father was a partner of, in noting the prices in his second-hand books.
Printing History
Written by Leo Marks (1920-2001)
HarperCollins
1998
ISBN 0-00-255944-7
