Rating: 
Summary: Don't think you like War Memoirs? Think again!
Review: "Between Silk and Cyanide" is one of the most fascinating, thought provoking memoirs of WWII I've ever come across. Leo Marks, heir to the bookstore made famous in "84 Charing Cross Road" was recruited as a teenager to work in the Codes Section of the British Intelligence at the height of the UK's war effort. This is his account of how he fought bureaucracy to save agents' lives &, incidentally, entirely revamped the Codes Dept.WIth humour, & much self-deprecating wit, Marks recounts the foibles and heroism of those he worked with. He reserves special admiration for the agents who actually infiltrated into Nazi-Occupied Europe & relied upon his coders for their very lives. Personally, I'd never given much thought to what was involved with being an agent or wireless operator behind enemy lines prior to reading "Between Silk and Cyanide" but now I'm overwhelmed by their bravery. Marks' battles with his bureaucratic betters are recalled with a dry British wit & affection for all involved. Never less than thoroughly entertaining, I learned quite a bit by reading "Between Silk and Cyanide". I only wish that Marks' had lived long enough to continue his life story; WWII was only the first chapter in an exceedingly eventful and multi-faceted life. It's a great loss that readers will never learn about the later years.
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Summary: Brings SOE Alive
Review: An interesting tale by a young man who joined the Signals directorate right out of code school. I call it a tale because it is written in a novel-like format that makes it hard to put down. Our hero's talent for breaking undecipherables and formulating new, unbreakable codes (LOPs and WOKs) barely keeps him one step ahead of his poorly-timed wit. At first his wisecracks will annoy you. Later they'll become the thing you like about him most. A useful look inside SOE in London showing the home perscpective. All the others tell about the agents in the field. This is the story of the guy at the desk who worries that he's sending new agents into a captured cell. Lots of information on the Dutch disaster. If nothing else, it will teach you what an imprecise science coding and wireless operations are and you will better understand how the Dutch screw-up could have happened.
As a WWII re-enactor portraying an SOE operative, I found this book more valuable than all the other SOE books combined. Why? Even though there are other first-hand accounts, none are as well-told as Marks. Even though he was never an agent, his personal interaction with the famous agents (Noor, Violette, and Tommy in particular) make you feel as if you knew them. It's an excellent piece of writing.
Rating:
Summary: Brings SOE Alive
Review: An interesting tale by a young man who joined the Signals directorate right out of code school. I call it a tale because it is written in a novel-like format that makes it hard to put down. Our hero's talent for breaking undecipherables and formulating new, unbreakable codes (LOPs and WOKs) barely keeps him one step ahead of his poorly-timed wit. At first his wisecracks will annoy you. Later they'll become the thing you like about him most. A useful look inside SOE in London showing the home perscpective. All the others tell about the agents in the field. This is the story of the guy at the desk who worries that he's sending new agents into a captured cell. Lots of information on the Dutch disaster. If nothing else, it will teach you what an imprecise science coding and wireless operations are and you will better understand how the Dutch screw-up could have happened.
As a WWII re-enactor portraying an SOE operative, I found this book more valuable than all the other SOE books combined. Why? Even though there are other first-hand accounts, none are as well-told as Marks. Even though he was never an agent, his personal interaction with the famous agents (Noor, Violette, and Tommy in particular) make you feel as if you knew them. It's an excellent piece of writing.
Rating:
Summary: brilliant
Review: 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 recounts which a lesser author would suppress. Certainly much of this book reads like a screen play. However, I caution the reader to errantly consider this book a Catch-22 because the facts relating to the disposition of various agents import the full horror of the War and the barbarianism of the Nazis. Marks held the key to protecting the life of the SOE agents in particular and later clandestine agents throughout the globe by creating new, fast, fault-free, and unbreakable codes which enabled the agents to remain in contact but not be routed out by easedroppers and enemy cryptographic resources. In this position he excelled beyond measure, but his narrative never presumes to reward himself for his brilliance. I thank him for providing us with his remarkable account.
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Summary: The last word on secret codes and bureaucracy
Review: Fifty years after the fact a superb writer describes his role in the "secret war" - eloquently juxtaposing whimsy, frustration, and grief interspersed with useful tutorials on code making and code breaking. It's also an inspiring homily about the ability of a thoroughly undisciplined individualist to thrive in an unlikely military setting. Self-distracted to the point of failing the training course for Bletchley Park, Marks was fobbed off on the Special Operations Executive (SOE), where his creativity bloomed. Within two years he was developing secure codes and implementing rational communication procedures for a multitude of Allied special operations forces. The author notes in passing (while rushing toward the final pages of his book) that many of the facts about the day-to-day activities of the SOE have been successfully obscured by its bitter bureaucratic rival, the Secret Intelligence Service, to whom SOE's records were unwisely entrusted when the organization was disbanded after the war. There are almost no books about which I could truly say, "I couldn't put it down," but this is one of them.
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Summary: Something new among the WWII babble
Review: 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 interest at several levels. On one hand it repeatedly amazes one with the brilliance of some the work they did, and on the other it leaves one breathless at some of the things they apparently struggled to achieve. To anyone with modern computer experience, the idea of having difficulty in designing a letter-based one time pad surely must be totally bemusing; am I too blasé because of long occupational exposure to the concept of arbitrary radix arithmetic? I am not stupid enough to think that I would have done any better in their place at that time, but I still do not quite know what to make of this. Several other cryptographic inventions discussed (but not all) are pretty trivial in terms of information theory, which is puzzling in the light of the highly non-trivial minds that are generally known to have been employed in the field at that time. Also, there are non-cryptographic technical details that I should have loved to discuss. For example, in a period of desperate austerity the insistence on printing agents' reference material on silk puzzles me. The justification was that silk fabric was easy to burn and to conceal in clothing. I should have thought that treating rayon or even very fine cotton with nitrocellulose would have been cheaper and more effective. But I don't know the real-life situation. I wish I did. But not at first hand, thank you. Marks himself was an unusual, brash, understandably not very modest, and clearly insecure young man, and he conveys his unusualness with a clinical wryness that spares neither himself nor anyone else. He is too skilled to leave me convinced that he is artless in every word he writes about himself, his favourites or his unfavourites, but if his story is substantially imaginary, this book is one of the greatest works of art of the twentieth century. If you disagree, try reading any (and I mean ANY) fictional blockbuster of comparable size and themes, whether historical romances or hard fiction, and try to find one that carries anything like the same conviction. Don't hurry to call me to compare notes. For my part I accept the book at face value as reminiscences from a retentive memory, supported by notes, slanted by personal perspective, and eroded by time. One can hardly demand better than that, especially in the light of the nauseating closing chapters, the loss of history and the closing in of the janitors and the of the vultures and parasites after the fray. As I read it, the book is a striking work dealing with arresting material, and it is absorbing, though heartbreaking, material to read.
Rating: 
Summary: Making codes in WWI
Review: First off I need to say that this was a fun read. The book was entertaining and informative. The author, Leo Marks, then in his early twenties, writes about his experiences as head of the British code section for the group who devised, sent and received, and translated codes for the men and women who went into Nazi occupied Western Europe to spy. Marks, a man who is now nearly 80, should be commended for putting down this rare piece of history in writing, as most of the records of the London code group have long since been destroyed, his memory is all we have. Ok, now this is a strange book. There is no doubt that is was written by Marks himself as no ghost writer could have concocted such a weirdly written text. It's annoying at first but one soon becomes used to it. For example, when describing a briefing he gave to a somewhat hostile audience: "Mounting a mile long platform an inch at a time, I confronted a large Nubian with crossed arms, which turned out to be a blackboard. He had colored chalk chalks on his person where lesser men had testicles, and I wrote my messages on his chest in block capitals which were twice their normal size as I had half my normal confidence." We have smiles parachuting from his eyes to his lips; he remembers the excitement and thrill of using the same loo that Churchill used; he remembers and recalls the figures (nothing to do with coding) of many of the women who he writes about. (He is a man of the 40's!) There is a gem on nearly every page. No ghost writer could ever concoct this menagerie. We do learn a lot about the coding business, especially in making the codes. We learn about the men and women who volunteered to spy, organize, and become part of the Resistance. Who used the codes and their wireless sets to send back information. A daring-do occupation as most of these agents were quickly captured and executed by the Nazis. Or as Marks might say, "They had the life expectancy of a crew in a yellow polka-dotted tank in combat." We learn that they fingerprinted the agent's Morse code keying, as each had their own peculiar style, and this could be a tip off if the the agent had been captured and Nazis had broken the code and were doing the keying. Most books on this subject concentrate on the breaking of codes. We also learn some of the tricks of the espionage trade. There are quips about lethal toilet paper, (scatology is his thing!) and of agents blithely being sent in when some higher ups in London knew the cover had been blown and Nazis would likely be the greeting party. Like any memoir that creates living and breathing scenes from events over half a century ago, it is hard to imagine that the writer could remember each frown, shrug of the shoulder, or other parts of the scene in such vivid detail. We'll write it off as poetic license. It is a very personal book, made even more so by Marks "distinctive" style. It's a good read and I give it 4 stars, taking one away for slightly annoying writing style.
Rating:
Summary: No L-Pill needed Here
Review: Leo Marks has an interesting turn of phrase. He gives an interesting look behind the "Secret War" aspects of World War II. What's interesting is that in addition to recounting the war with the Axis forces, he also discusses a certain amount of infighting between various British crypto units. There are no headline-generating revelations here; there don't need to be. The book provides an in-depth insight into Allied intelligence activities on an "in the trenches" perspective.
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Summary: My Second Favorite Book
Review: Leo Marks is the son of the famous bookstore owner immortalized by romantic movie "84 Charing Cross Road". The bookstore and his childhood interest in codes stand him in good stead for the job he does for England during WW2 working for the cryptographic center that communicates with England's spies and secret agents in Europe. His words are enchanting, humor is evident on every page, he opens up and shares his thoughts with us as a 22-25 year old, out-of-place in the military, code maker genius. A not-to-be-missed opportunity to see the topic from the inside through the eyes of a particularly good author who will hold your attention through the entire volume. No low spots, no chapters best skipped, a real treat for a bookworm.....
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Summary: Wry wit from a boy-genius WWII cryptographer
Review: Leo Marks writes a very entertaining autobiographical account of his important role in creating codes for the British during WWII. He tells amazing stories of fascinating, daredevil, behind-the-lines, eat-the-code-if-they-catch-you spys against the Germans. I agree with other reviewers that his tone is slightly self-congratulatory. Even at 70-something (when he wrote it), he comes off as a slightly cocky little boy. My greatest problem is that he goes over how the code works so very very fast that most readers will have a hard time understanding exactly what he did. There is lots of jargon that he could have taken more time to explain (a double-key code??). You end up feeling that Marks is just a little bit smarter than you and that THAT is why you don't quite follow him. I would recommend reading this in combination with, or even after, Simon Singh's The Code Book, which explains how the codes work. After you read Singh's book, Marks will be entertaining WITHOUT the frustration.
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