Codebreaker who saved agents' lives by improving the security of wartime ciphers.
Marks joined the British Army in January 1942. Trained as a cryptographer he was assigned to the Special Operations Executive. Marks became an expert in cryptanalysis (making and breaking codes and ciphers) and eventually became head of SOE's codes and ciphers with a staff of 400 people. It was Marks's responsibility to provide agents with the ciphers with which to send information to London by radio.
These ciphers were often based on famous poems or brief passages of memorable prose such as the Lord's Prayer. Marks argued that the enemy might know the poem or the prose passage and would then be able to break the cipher. To overcome this problem Marks provided unknown poems for his agents. This included the poem The Life That I Have, that had originally been written for his girlfriend, Ruth Hambro who had been killed in an air crash in Canada. He later gave the poem as a cipher to the SOE agent Violette Szabo when she was sent to France during the war.
Marks also had trouble with his autobiography Between Silk and Cyanide, that challenged the official history of the Special Operations Executive written by M.R.D. Foot. Although written in the early 1980s it was blocked by Whitehall and only appeared in 1998. He also published The Life That I Have in 1999.
As a young man Leo Marks played a critical, if contentious, role in the wartime Special Operations Executive. He then moved into film.
Marks was born into a devout Jewish family: his father was the bookseller later immortalised by Leo's friend Helen Hanff at 84 Charing Cross Road. Leo, a bright only child, began his codebreaking experience at the age of eight, by cracking the price codes in his fathers and his uncles shops. Schooled at St Pauls, he showed great if erratic promise, and on leaving school helped his father sell antiquarian books.
Coding was already a hobby, and he bombarded several government departments with suggestions for new systems. Early in 1942 he was sent to a course at Bedford of formal instruction on cipher and decipher, with a score of companions. They all satisfied their examiners and disappeared to Bletchley. He, wayward as always, appeared to have failed, and found himself directed (on a month's trial) to SOE to take charge of its agents' ciphers. It was impressed on him from the start that he was in a secret service: his family thought he was in the Ministry of Supply. He survived his month's trial, and settled down to reconstruct a cipher system that he could see was fundamentally flawed. Agents' ciphers each hinged on a separate poem or brief passage of memorable prose (such as a phrase from the Lord's Prayer). No one else seemed to have noticed that the enemy might know the poem, or the prose passage, and so be able to break the cipher with ease.
As a start, he took to composing agents' poems himself. He lived with his parents in a block of flats on the Edgware Road, where the current executive head of SOE, Sir Charles Hambro, also had a flat. Marks cherished a hopeless passion for a daughter of Hambro, and when she was killed in an air crash in Canada wrote a brief dirge. This he later gave to a woman agent he was briefing, Violette Szabo. It went public when it was included in a best-selling life of her, and has since become a very popular poem. It begins: The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have Is yours.
After 18 months' effort, he managed to convince his seniors that they had made a catastrophic mistake in using poem codes at all. He reinvented one-time pad, not knowing that the Foreign Office had been using it all through the war. This gave agents a much safer cipher base. He also vastly improved their inefficient systems of security checks.
All this he set out, long after the event, in Between Silk and Cyanide (1998), a six-hundred-pager on life inside SOE's headquarters which is startlingly at variance with the more robust accounts of such writers as Bickham Sweet Escott or John Beevor. It presents a view from below, by a Jewish civilian junior staff officer who believed himself despised because he was Jewish, and knew himself to be cleverer than most or perhaps all of those with whom he had to deal. He certainly saved a great many lives by improving wireless operators' security. He had grave doubts about operations into Holland, which he feared had been compromised. All the messages reaching SOE by wireless from Holland arrived without being mutilated in transit a stark contrast with the traffic from everywhere else in north-west Europe. In 1989 he recounted, at a conference attended by Prince Bernhard, how he had established that his suspicions were well founded. He arranged for a British operator to send 'HH' at the end of a routine message; this provoked an instant 'HH' in reply from Holland. This was standard Nazi operators' drill: HH stood for Heil Hitler. But it took months to convince the operational staff of the danger. He also had incessant troubles with the Free French, who persevered in using a code he reckoned an intelligent schoolboy could break in an afternoon. With the help of Yeo-Thomas, GC, he persuaded even them to change.
At the end of the war Marks was moved, for a transient and embarrassed few months, into the signals branch of the secret intelligence service, but was then released. He abandoned the book trade to become a film impresario, and spent more than fifty years in the tumultuous world of the cinema. Many harrowing experiences of his SOE years continued to haunt him. He condensed them into the script of a 1960s film, which Michael Powell directed, called Peeping Tom. The critics all denounced it as criminal porn, and Powell's career suffered. It was recently revived, for a more tolerant age, on television.
At the turn of the century, Marks's life began to crumble. A childless marriage of more than forty years with Elena Gaussen Marks, the painter, suddenly dissolved in acrimony. A liver complaint necessitated a big operation. He got into troubles over money. Yet he deserves to be remembered as he was a man of undoubted brilliance, who played an outstanding part in the war against Hitler.
Leo Marks, codebreaker, codemaker and impresario, was born in 1920. He died on January 15 aged 80.
Marks joined the British Army in January 1942. Trained as a cryptographer he was assigned to the Special Operations Executive. Marks became an expert in cryptanalysis (making and breaking codes and ciphers) and eventually became head of SOE's codes and ciphers with a staff of 400 people. It was Marks's responsibility to provide agents with the ciphers with which to send information to London by radio.
These ciphers were often based on famous poems or brief passages of memorable prose such as the Lord's Prayer. Marks argued that the enemy might know the poem or the prose passage and would then be able to break the cipher. To overcome this problem Marks provided unknown poems for his agents. This included the poem The Life That I Have, that had originally been written for his girlfriend, Ruth Hambro who had been killed in an air crash in Canada. He later gave the poem as a cipher to the SOE agent Violette Szabo when she was sent to France during the war.
Marks also had trouble with his autobiography Between Silk and Cyanide, that challenged the official history of the Special Operations Executive written by M.R.D. Foot. Although written in the early 1980s it was blocked by Whitehall and only appeared in 1998. He also published The Life That I Have in 1999.
As a young man Leo Marks played a critical, if contentious, role in the wartime Special Operations Executive. He then moved into film.
Marks was born into a devout Jewish family: his father was the bookseller later immortalised by Leo's friend Helen Hanff at 84 Charing Cross Road. Leo, a bright only child, began his codebreaking experience at the age of eight, by cracking the price codes in his fathers and his uncles shops. Schooled at St Pauls, he showed great if erratic promise, and on leaving school helped his father sell antiquarian books.
Coding was already a hobby, and he bombarded several government departments with suggestions for new systems. Early in 1942 he was sent to a course at Bedford of formal instruction on cipher and decipher, with a score of companions. They all satisfied their examiners and disappeared to Bletchley. He, wayward as always, appeared to have failed, and found himself directed (on a month's trial) to SOE to take charge of its agents' ciphers. It was impressed on him from the start that he was in a secret service: his family thought he was in the Ministry of Supply. He survived his month's trial, and settled down to reconstruct a cipher system that he could see was fundamentally flawed. Agents' ciphers each hinged on a separate poem or brief passage of memorable prose (such as a phrase from the Lord's Prayer). No one else seemed to have noticed that the enemy might know the poem, or the prose passage, and so be able to break the cipher with ease.
As a start, he took to composing agents' poems himself. He lived with his parents in a block of flats on the Edgware Road, where the current executive head of SOE, Sir Charles Hambro, also had a flat. Marks cherished a hopeless passion for a daughter of Hambro, and when she was killed in an air crash in Canada wrote a brief dirge. This he later gave to a woman agent he was briefing, Violette Szabo. It went public when it was included in a best-selling life of her, and has since become a very popular poem. It begins: The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have Is yours.
After 18 months' effort, he managed to convince his seniors that they had made a catastrophic mistake in using poem codes at all. He reinvented one-time pad, not knowing that the Foreign Office had been using it all through the war. This gave agents a much safer cipher base. He also vastly improved their inefficient systems of security checks.
All this he set out, long after the event, in Between Silk and Cyanide (1998), a six-hundred-pager on life inside SOE's headquarters which is startlingly at variance with the more robust accounts of such writers as Bickham Sweet Escott or John Beevor. It presents a view from below, by a Jewish civilian junior staff officer who believed himself despised because he was Jewish, and knew himself to be cleverer than most or perhaps all of those with whom he had to deal. He certainly saved a great many lives by improving wireless operators' security. He had grave doubts about operations into Holland, which he feared had been compromised. All the messages reaching SOE by wireless from Holland arrived without being mutilated in transit a stark contrast with the traffic from everywhere else in north-west Europe. In 1989 he recounted, at a conference attended by Prince Bernhard, how he had established that his suspicions were well founded. He arranged for a British operator to send 'HH' at the end of a routine message; this provoked an instant 'HH' in reply from Holland. This was standard Nazi operators' drill: HH stood for Heil Hitler. But it took months to convince the operational staff of the danger. He also had incessant troubles with the Free French, who persevered in using a code he reckoned an intelligent schoolboy could break in an afternoon. With the help of Yeo-Thomas, GC, he persuaded even them to change.
At the end of the war Marks was moved, for a transient and embarrassed few months, into the signals branch of the secret intelligence service, but was then released. He abandoned the book trade to become a film impresario, and spent more than fifty years in the tumultuous world of the cinema. Many harrowing experiences of his SOE years continued to haunt him. He condensed them into the script of a 1960s film, which Michael Powell directed, called Peeping Tom. The critics all denounced it as criminal porn, and Powell's career suffered. It was recently revived, for a more tolerant age, on television.
At the turn of the century, Marks's life began to crumble. A childless marriage of more than forty years with Elena Gaussen Marks, the painter, suddenly dissolved in acrimony. A liver complaint necessitated a big operation. He got into troubles over money. Yet he deserves to be remembered as he was a man of undoubted brilliance, who played an outstanding part in the war against Hitler.
Leo Marks, codebreaker, codemaker and impresario, was born in 1920. He died on January 15 aged 80.
Codebreaker who saved agents' lives by improving the security of wartime ciphers.
Marks joined the British Army in January 1942. Trained as a cryptographer he was assigned to the Special Operations Executive. Marks became an expert in cryptanalysis (making and breaking codes and ciphers) and eventually became head of SOE's codes and ciphers with a staff of 400 people. It was Marks's responsibility to provide agents with the ciphers with which to send information to London by radio.
These ciphers were often based on famous poems or brief passages of memorable prose such as the Lord's Prayer. Marks argued that the enemy might know the poem or the prose passage and would then be able to break the cipher. To overcome this problem Marks provided unknown poems for his agents. This included the poem The Life That I Have, that had originally been written for his girlfriend, Ruth Hambro who had been killed in an air crash in Canada. He later gave the poem as a cipher to the SOE agent Violette Szabo when she was sent to France during the war.
Marks also had trouble with his autobiography Between Silk and Cyanide, that challenged the official history of the Special Operations Executive written by M.R.D. Foot. Although written in the early 1980s it was blocked by Whitehall and only appeared in 1998. He also published The Life That I Have in 1999.
As a young man Leo Marks played a critical, if contentious, role in the wartime Special Operations Executive. He then moved into film.
Marks was born into a devout Jewish family: his father was the bookseller later immortalised by Leo's friend Helen Hanff at 84 Charing Cross Road. Leo, a bright only child, began his codebreaking experience at the age of eight, by cracking the price codes in his fathers and his uncles shops. Schooled at St Pauls, he showed great if erratic promise, and on leaving school helped his father sell antiquarian books.
Coding was already a hobby, and he bombarded several government departments with suggestions for new systems. Early in 1942 he was sent to a course at Bedford of formal instruction on cipher and decipher, with a score of companions. They all satisfied their examiners and disappeared to Bletchley. He, wayward as always, appeared to have failed, and found himself directed (on a month's trial) to SOE to take charge of its agents' ciphers. It was impressed on him from the start that he was in a secret service: his family thought he was in the Ministry of Supply. He survived his month's trial, and settled down to reconstruct a cipher system that he could see was fundamentally flawed. Agents' ciphers each hinged on a separate poem or brief passage of memorable prose (such as a phrase from the Lord's Prayer). No one else seemed to have noticed that the enemy might know the poem, or the prose passage, and so be able to break the cipher with ease.
As a start, he took to composing agents' poems himself. He lived with his parents in a block of flats on the Edgware Road, where the current executive head of SOE, Sir Charles Hambro, also had a flat. Marks cherished a hopeless passion for a daughter of Hambro, and when she was killed in an air crash in Canada wrote a brief dirge. This he later gave to a woman agent he was briefing, Violette Szabo. It went public when it was included in a best-selling life of her, and has since become a very popular poem. It begins: The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have Is yours.
After 18 months' effort, he managed to convince his seniors that they had made a catastrophic mistake in using poem codes at all. He reinvented one-time pad, not knowing that the Foreign Office had been using it all through the war. This gave agents a much safer cipher base. He also vastly improved their inefficient systems of security checks.
All this he set out, long after the event, in Between Silk and Cyanide (1998), a six-hundred-pager on life inside SOE's headquarters which is startlingly at variance with the more robust accounts of such writers as Bickham Sweet Escott or John Beevor. It presents a view from below, by a Jewish civilian junior staff officer who believed himself despised because he was Jewish, and knew himself to be cleverer than most or perhaps all of those with whom he had to deal. He certainly saved a great many lives by improving wireless operators' security. He had grave doubts about operations into Holland, which he feared had been compromised. All the messages reaching SOE by wireless from Holland arrived without being mutilated in transit a stark contrast with the traffic from everywhere else in north-west Europe. In 1989 he recounted, at a conference attended by Prince Bernhard, how he had established that his suspicions were well founded. He arranged for a British operator to send 'HH' at the end of a routine message; this provoked an instant 'HH' in reply from Holland. This was standard Nazi operators' drill: HH stood for Heil Hitler. But it took months to convince the operational staff of the danger. He also had incessant troubles with the Free French, who persevered in using a code he reckoned an intelligent schoolboy could break in an afternoon. With the help of Yeo-Thomas, GC, he persuaded even them to change.
At the end of the war Marks was moved, for a transient and embarrassed few months, into the signals branch of the secret intelligence service, but was then released. He abandoned the book trade to become a film impresario, and spent more than fifty years in the tumultuous world of the cinema. Many harrowing experiences of his SOE years continued to haunt him. He condensed them into the script of a 1960s film, which Michael Powell directed, called Peeping Tom. The critics all denounced it as criminal porn, and Powell's career suffered. It was recently revived, for a more tolerant age, on television.
At the turn of the century, Marks's life began to crumble. A childless marriage of more than forty years with Elena Gaussen Marks, the painter, suddenly dissolved in acrimony. A liver complaint necessitated a big operation. He got into troubles over money. Yet he deserves to be remembered as he was a man of undoubted brilliance, who played an outstanding part in the war against Hitler.
Leo Marks, codebreaker, codemaker and impresario, was born in 1920. He died on January 15 aged 80.
Marks joined the British Army in January 1942. Trained as a cryptographer he was assigned to the Special Operations Executive. Marks became an expert in cryptanalysis (making and breaking codes and ciphers) and eventually became head of SOE's codes and ciphers with a staff of 400 people. It was Marks's responsibility to provide agents with the ciphers with which to send information to London by radio.
These ciphers were often based on famous poems or brief passages of memorable prose such as the Lord's Prayer. Marks argued that the enemy might know the poem or the prose passage and would then be able to break the cipher. To overcome this problem Marks provided unknown poems for his agents. This included the poem The Life That I Have, that had originally been written for his girlfriend, Ruth Hambro who had been killed in an air crash in Canada. He later gave the poem as a cipher to the SOE agent Violette Szabo when she was sent to France during the war.
Marks also had trouble with his autobiography Between Silk and Cyanide, that challenged the official history of the Special Operations Executive written by M.R.D. Foot. Although written in the early 1980s it was blocked by Whitehall and only appeared in 1998. He also published The Life That I Have in 1999.
As a young man Leo Marks played a critical, if contentious, role in the wartime Special Operations Executive. He then moved into film.
Marks was born into a devout Jewish family: his father was the bookseller later immortalised by Leo's friend Helen Hanff at 84 Charing Cross Road. Leo, a bright only child, began his codebreaking experience at the age of eight, by cracking the price codes in his fathers and his uncles shops. Schooled at St Pauls, he showed great if erratic promise, and on leaving school helped his father sell antiquarian books.
Coding was already a hobby, and he bombarded several government departments with suggestions for new systems. Early in 1942 he was sent to a course at Bedford of formal instruction on cipher and decipher, with a score of companions. They all satisfied their examiners and disappeared to Bletchley. He, wayward as always, appeared to have failed, and found himself directed (on a month's trial) to SOE to take charge of its agents' ciphers. It was impressed on him from the start that he was in a secret service: his family thought he was in the Ministry of Supply. He survived his month's trial, and settled down to reconstruct a cipher system that he could see was fundamentally flawed. Agents' ciphers each hinged on a separate poem or brief passage of memorable prose (such as a phrase from the Lord's Prayer). No one else seemed to have noticed that the enemy might know the poem, or the prose passage, and so be able to break the cipher with ease.
As a start, he took to composing agents' poems himself. He lived with his parents in a block of flats on the Edgware Road, where the current executive head of SOE, Sir Charles Hambro, also had a flat. Marks cherished a hopeless passion for a daughter of Hambro, and when she was killed in an air crash in Canada wrote a brief dirge. This he later gave to a woman agent he was briefing, Violette Szabo. It went public when it was included in a best-selling life of her, and has since become a very popular poem. It begins: The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have Is yours.
After 18 months' effort, he managed to convince his seniors that they had made a catastrophic mistake in using poem codes at all. He reinvented one-time pad, not knowing that the Foreign Office had been using it all through the war. This gave agents a much safer cipher base. He also vastly improved their inefficient systems of security checks.
All this he set out, long after the event, in Between Silk and Cyanide (1998), a six-hundred-pager on life inside SOE's headquarters which is startlingly at variance with the more robust accounts of such writers as Bickham Sweet Escott or John Beevor. It presents a view from below, by a Jewish civilian junior staff officer who believed himself despised because he was Jewish, and knew himself to be cleverer than most or perhaps all of those with whom he had to deal. He certainly saved a great many lives by improving wireless operators' security. He had grave doubts about operations into Holland, which he feared had been compromised. All the messages reaching SOE by wireless from Holland arrived without being mutilated in transit a stark contrast with the traffic from everywhere else in north-west Europe. In 1989 he recounted, at a conference attended by Prince Bernhard, how he had established that his suspicions were well founded. He arranged for a British operator to send 'HH' at the end of a routine message; this provoked an instant 'HH' in reply from Holland. This was standard Nazi operators' drill: HH stood for Heil Hitler. But it took months to convince the operational staff of the danger. He also had incessant troubles with the Free French, who persevered in using a code he reckoned an intelligent schoolboy could break in an afternoon. With the help of Yeo-Thomas, GC, he persuaded even them to change.
At the end of the war Marks was moved, for a transient and embarrassed few months, into the signals branch of the secret intelligence service, but was then released. He abandoned the book trade to become a film impresario, and spent more than fifty years in the tumultuous world of the cinema. Many harrowing experiences of his SOE years continued to haunt him. He condensed them into the script of a 1960s film, which Michael Powell directed, called Peeping Tom. The critics all denounced it as criminal porn, and Powell's career suffered. It was recently revived, for a more tolerant age, on television.
At the turn of the century, Marks's life began to crumble. A childless marriage of more than forty years with Elena Gaussen Marks, the painter, suddenly dissolved in acrimony. A liver complaint necessitated a big operation. He got into troubles over money. Yet he deserves to be remembered as he was a man of undoubted brilliance, who played an outstanding part in the war against Hitler.
Leo Marks, codebreaker, codemaker and impresario, was born in 1920. He died on January 15 aged 80.
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