The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [285]
For the moment I have to change places after each transmission, with only one set this means that it has to be carried from place to place in order to maintain daily contacts. Owing to the absence of other means of transport this has to be done mostly on foot. Last Sunday I had to walk 9 miles carrying MED [his radio set] and the aerial, you can guess what a sport that is. Incidentally, the handle of the case is not strong enough, mine broke twice. I can tell you it is not very easy to carry without a handle.
Magpie proposed that, to avoid the risky moving of a radio set from place to place, more sets should be provided, which could be left ‘in different parts of or outside the town’. Balancing Magpie’s complaints (which considering the life-and-death circumstances in which he worked seem rather mild) was appreciation for the support he got from London. ‘I must thank Home Station’, he wrote, ‘for their work during the last months, contacts always having been made very rapidly. You may be sure that all of us here do our utmost to make these contacts a success.’ Commenting on the letter, Kenneth Cohen noted that Magpie’s network had been more or less on the run during the previous two months and suggested that his difficulties bore out the case ‘for more W/T sets in each group’. London was able to respond, and after Magpie had been in the field for six months there were thirty radio sets working in his network, for which he recruited and trained the operators locally.
Apart from the vagaries of weather, air pressure, power supply, local security arrangements and so on, reliable wireless communication also depended on the most scrupulous attention to detail in the preparation of signals, as is illustrated by one case in January 1944. Section VIII broadcast a signal for a Free French agent code-named ‘Bonita Granville’ informing him to be ready for a message at 1300 the next day. A signal of this sort was generally sent blind to a number of agents without acknowledgement by them, and London had no means of knowing for certain that the message had been received until actual contact was made at the time specified. Agents, however, also made regular contact at pre-arranged times and, as it happened, this agent’s next scheduled contact was at 1200 the following day, when, after passing other traffic, the signal about contact at 1300 as requested by P.1 (the section which ran Free French networks) was repeated, and acknowledged by the agent. But at 1300 the agent did not respond to London’s call. At 1400, however, the Free French communications training section based at Ealing in west London (who regularly monitored the traffic with France) telephoned Section VIII to say that Bonita Granville was calling London. Contact was made and a further message was sent asking him ‘to listen to us at 2000 the same night’. The agent replied asking: ‘check and repeat your encoding’. London did so, but the agent twice more asked them to ‘check and repeat’. ‘After this it is said that the agent in exasperation made the signal “Merde, merde, merde!!” and closed his station.’
What had gone wrong? Gambier-Parry himself investigated the case, personally coding and recoding the messages, which ‘came out correctly as sent by the operator’. Only when he compared the coding substitution table used in France with the master copy in London did he discover that, ‘owing to the misplacement of one figure in one line of typing out the copy’, a coding error had resulted in the first message asking Bonita to call at 1400 (which he had done), and the second asking him to