"The Life That I Have"

I think our little samples of cryptography have left the impression that code-making and code-breaking is a world of dull cubicle math(s) nerds. The work may be intellectually interesting, but the life of modern cryptographers seems colorless and uninteresting.

But modern cryptography began with a guy named Edgar Allan Poe, and I think he branded cryptography forever with a deep fragrance not just of lurid mystery, but of danger and adventure. People and governments go to a lot of trouble to keep their secrets secret, and to uncover the other side's secrets. In Real Life, ETAOINSHRDLU can be very close to a bullet in the back of the head.

Leo Marks and the Code World he belonged to were certainly not dull. During World War Two, he was responsible for giving British secret agents a safe and reliable code system -- or as safe a system as possible under wartime conditions deep in enemy territory.

Memorizing poems was already a popular way to send spies to Europe with all the code keys in their heads, no need to write anything down. Unfortunately, when the enemy figures out you're using poems by Keats and Shelley, it's not hard to find The Oxford Book of English Verse and try to decode intercepts using these famous old poems.

Marks made the system far more secure by using, and in some cases composing, original poems -- poetry for codemakers. Certainly nothing could have been more in the spirit of Our Founder, Edgar Allan Poe.

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from 64 Baker Street, website about the women secret agents of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War Two.

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Of all the [British secret] agents that [the cryptographer Leo] Marks briefed there is one in particular – Violette Szabo – with whom he will always be linked. In 1943 Marks met and fell in love with a woman who lived in a neighbouring flat in the Edgware Road, but within three months she had been killed in an air-crash.

When, early the next year, Szabo needed a code-poem for a mission in France, Marks gave her the lines that he had written for the dead woman. Curious, Szabo asked who had written them. 'I'll check up,' Marks told her, 'and let you know when you get back.'

In fact, as Marks had feared, Szabo never returned, but was captured, tortured and eventually executed at Ravensbrück.

In 1958 a film of Szabo's life was made, named "Carve Her Name With Pride" starring Virginia McKenna as Szabo. In the film, before kneeling down to be shot in the back of the head (as was witnessed by another British agent in the camp), Szabo recites the code-poem Marks had given her. On the film's release, and despite Marks's request for anonymity, he was eventually named as the author of the poem. A recent survey of the The Nation's 100 Favourite Poems showed that 'The Life That I Have' is still in the top 20.


The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours.

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause.

For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Leo Marks

[image] Leo Marks at the opening of the Violette Szabo Museum, Wormelow

Leopold Samuel Marks (September 24, 1920–January 15, 2001) was an English cryptographer and scriptwriter.

Early life

Born the son of an antiquarian bookseller in London, he was first introduced to cryptography when his father showed him a copy of Edgar Allan Poe's story, The Gold Bug. From this early interest, he demonstrated his skill at codebreaking at an early age by deciphering his father's secret price codes.

His father, Benjamin Marks, owned the Marks & Co. bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road, which achieved international fame with the 1970 book of that title by New York writer Helene Hanff and the later plays and movie.

As a teenager, he earned pocket money by setting the notoriously difficult Times cryptic crossword.

Work in cryptography

Marks joined the Armed Services in January 1942, and went to Bedford to train as a cryptographer. His original and unorthodox mode of thought led to him being the only one of his class judged not good enough to be sent to Bletchley Park; instead, he was sent to a rival organisation of the intelligence services, the recently formed Special Operations Executive (SOE). When his abilities subsequently became evident, he was referred to by Bletchley Park as "the one that got away".

Marks personally briefed many of the Allied agents being sent into occupied Europe, including Noor Inayat Khan, and his own close friend, the legendary White Rabbit, 'Tommy' Yeo-Thomas. A highly empathetic and imaginative personality (as well as a self-professed coward), Marks continually acted on the rarely expressed premise that agents in occupied territories deserved every conceivable bit of support that those enjoying safety and freedom could provide — an attitude which is only just, considering their contribution to freedom and a level of personal sacrifice that would make most veteran soldiers feel humble, yet an attitude which is not always common among individuals, still less among bureaucracies.

Although personally in charge only of agent codes, by making a habit of walking into bureaucratic lion's dens, the young and "cowardly" Mr. Marks saved lives in the field. One of his first challenges (stubbornly resisted by the establishment) was to phase out the use of double transposition ciphers using keys based on preselected poems. These poem ciphers had the limited advantage of being easy to memorise, but a number of significant disadvantages, including limited cryptographic security, substantial minimum message sizes (short ones were hopelessly easy to crack), and the fact that the complexity of using them caused a significant number of encoding errors to be made resulting in garbled messages.

Cryptographic security was greatly enhanced by Marks's innovations, especially "worked-out keys" (he was widely credited with inventing the "letter one-time pad," but while he did independently discover the method he was later to find that it was already in use at Bletchley).

While attempting to relegate poem codes to emergency use only, he enhanced their security by promoting the use of original poems in preference to widely known ones, thus forcing a would-be cracker to work it out the hard way for each message instead of being able to guess an agent's entire set of keys after breaking the key to a single message (or possibly even just part of the key.)

Something of a poet himself, Marks wrote and gave to the agent Violette Szabo the poignant The Life That I Have, which gained popularity when it was used in the 1958 film about her, "Carve Her Name With Pride."

Gestapo signal tracers made clandestine radio operators an especially endangered species (life expectancy averaged about three weeks), so shorter and less frequent transmissions were the greatest gift a codemaster had to bestow. Being human and under pressure agents frequently made mistakes encoding messages, and the old practice was for the home station to tell them to recode it (usually a reasonably safe activity) and retransmit it (very dangerous, increasingly so the longer it takes).

In response to this problem Marks established, staffed, and trained a large group (based at Grendon Underwood, Buckinghamshire) to cryptanalyse garbled messages ("indecipherables") so that they could be dealt with in England without forcing the agent to run the risk of retransmission from the field. Other innovations of his simplified encoding in the field which reduced errors, and also made shorter messages possible, both of which reduced transmission time.

The Germans generally didn't just murder captured radio operators out of hand. The goal was to "turn" and use them, or at least to extract enough information to be able to convincingly imitate them. For the safety of entire underground "circuits" it was important to be able to determine if a given operator was genuine and still free, and existing means of independently checking were primitive. When, due to the unusual lack of transcription errors in messages from agents in Holland, Marks became increasingly convinced (but not able to "prove" it) that the situation in the Netherlands was completely out of SOE's control and that they were being toyed with by the Germans (who among themselves actually did call it a game — Das Englandspiel), he was repeatedly told (for basically political reasons) to keep his mouth shut while as many as fifty agents were delivered directly to the Gestapo. The other side of this story was published in 1953 by Marks's German "opposite number" in Holland, H J Giskes in London Calling North Pole.

After SOE

He left SOE in 1946 and declined an offer of employment from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). He went on to write a number of marginally successful plays and films, including The Girl Who Couldn't Quite (1947), Cloudburst (1951), The Best Damn Lie (1957), Sebastian (1968) and Twisted Nerve (1968). Marks also wrote the script for Michael Powell's intelligent and highly controversial Peeping Tom (1960), the story of a serial killer who films his victims while stabbing them to death. Marks also provided the voice of the Devil in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

In 1998, Marks published a book about his work in SOE — Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's Story 1941-1945. The book was reportedly written in the early 1980s, but didn't receive the UK Government's approval for publication until 1998.

He married the portrait painter Elena Gaussen in 1966, a marriage that lasted until shortly before his death in January 2001.

References

* Leo Marks, Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's Story 1941-1945. (HarperCollins, 1998). ISBN 0-684-86780-X.

* Philippe Ganier-Raymond, The Tangled Web, (Arthur Barker 1968, Warner Paperback ISBN 0-446-65934-7, originally published in French as Le Réseau Éntranglé) one of the central stories in Marks' book, the betrayal of the SOE Dutch network, told from the Dutch and German points of view.

External links

* Leo Marks at the Powell & Pressburger pages
* Leo Marks Obituary & Photo

Categories: English cryptographers | Pre-computer cryptographers | Special Operations Executive | British military personnel of World War II | British Jews | Jewish scientists | 1920 births | 2001 deaths

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