Blog number 259 **** 18 December 2008
The main plot in this book is that the author, "Leo Marks," is convinced that the agents in Holland have all been caught and therefore the messages being sent to London have all been written by the Nazi Gestapo, but he cannot get his superiors to listen to him.
The reason that Leo thinks that the Dutch agents have been compromised is that the Dutch are the only group that never sends indecipherables.
Indecipherables are coded messages that the agent has miscoded by misaligning the number columns, misspelling a word, or some other similar cause. If the London office cannot read them they must either be decoded or the agent asked to resend.
Since the Gestapo runs radio detection vans looking for illegal wireless operators, resending a message increases the chances that the wireless operator will be caught. Since the agent is naturally under stress when sending, it is not all that unlikly that an indecipherable will be sent. The fact that the Dutch never mess up a code suggests that they are under no stress, as would be the case if the Gestapo were the senders.
Leo notices that most of the Free French's indecipherables are never deciphered owing to the fact that there is an agreement between General De Gaulle and London that Free French messages are to be "hands off." He decided to secretly decipher them in order to make the Free French agents safer.
Called in to an interview with two of his top bosses one day, one of them springs on him the question, "What do you know about the secret French code?"
He replied, "I'm not allowed to know anything about it, sir."
The boss snapped, "That's not what I asked you."
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