Between Silk and Cyanide

This memoir follows Leo Marks's wartime work as a codes officer for the Special Operations Executive in London. Still a young civilian, he briefs agents on poem ciphers, designs better systems when he sees how fragile those poems are, and handles the traffic of circuits in occupied Europe. Silk one-time pads, the risk of a captured codebook, and the disaster of a compromised Dutch network occupy much of the book. Agents appear as people he must arm with a code they can remember under pressure. The book is a cryptographic memoir, not a general history of SOE.

Three-quarter bound in brown cloth with light brown silk panel on front board printed with text. Dark brown slipcase.