Leo Marks
Encyclopedia
Leopold Samuel Marks was an English
cryptographer, screenwriter
and playwright
.
, 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 that he wrote inside the covers of books.
His father, Benjamin Marks, was joint owner of 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
.
, about his work in cryptography. Marks joined the Armed Services and went to Bedford to train as a cryptographer.
; 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
, the Grouse/Swallow team of four Norwegian Telemark
saboteurs 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.
In an interview with Channel Four included in the DVD of the film Peeping Tom
, Marks quoted General Eisenhower as saying that his group's work shortened the war by three months, saving countless lives.
s using key
s 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 method's complexity caused a significant number of encoding errors.
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 would later find that it was already in use at Bletchley.
, 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
. According to his book, Marks wrote the poem about a girlfriend, Ruth Hambro, who was killed in an air crash in Canada.
signal tracers greatly endangered clandestine radio operators, and their life expectancy averaged about six weeks. Therefore, short and less frequent transmissions from the codemaster were of considerable value. The inevitable pressure could cause agents to make mistakes encoding messages, and the established practice was for the home station to tell them to recode it (usually a reasonably safe activity) and retransmit it (very dangerous, and increasingly so the longer it took). 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 risk retransmitting 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.
:
Gubbins grills Marks. In particular he wants to know who has seen this report, who typed it (Marks did):
(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), Guns at Batasi
(co-writer) (1964), Sebastian
(1968) and Twisted Nerve
(1968).
Marks also wrote the script for Michael Powell
's 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 at home, from cancer, in January 2001.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
cryptographer, screenwriter
Screenwriter
Screenwriters or scriptwriters or scenario writers are people who write/create the short or feature-length screenplays from which mass media such as films, television programs, Comics or video games are based.-Profession:...
and playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
.
Early life
Born the son of an antiquarian bookseller in LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, he was first introduced to cryptography
Cryptography
Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...
when his father showed him a copy of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
's story, "The Gold-Bug
The Gold-Bug
"The Gold-Bug" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Set on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, the plot follows William Legrand, who was recently bitten by a gold-colored bug. His servant Jupiter fears him to be going insane and goes to Legrand's friend, an unnamed narrator who agrees to visit his...
". From this early interest, he demonstrated his skill at codebreaking at an early age by deciphering his father's secret price codes that he wrote inside the covers of books.
His father, Benjamin Marks, was joint owner of the Marks & Co
Marks & Co
Marks & Co, also incorrectly referred to as "Marks & Company" or colloquially as "84", was a well-known antiquarian bookseller located at Cambridge Circus - 84, Charing Cross Road, London....
bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road
84 Charing Cross Road
84, Charing Cross Road is a 1970 book by Helene Hanff, later made into a stage play, television play and film, about the twenty-year correspondence between her and Frank Doel, chief buyer of Marks & Co, antiquarian booksellers located at the eponymous address in London, England.Hanff, in search of...
, which achieved international fame with the 1970 book of that title by New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
writer Helene Hanff
Helene Hanff
Helene Hanff was an American writer. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she is best known as the author of the book 84, Charing Cross Road, which became the basis for a stage play, , and film of the same name.- Career :...
and the later plays and movie.
As a teenager, he earned pocket money by setting the notoriously difficult Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
cryptic crossword
Cryptic crossword
Cryptic crosswords are crossword puzzles in which each clue is a word puzzle in and of itself. Cryptic crosswords are particularly popular in the United Kingdom, where they originated, Ireland, the Netherlands, and in several Commonwealth nations, including Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malta,...
.
Work in cryptography
So begins his book, Between Silk and CyanideBetween Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's Story 1941-1945
Between Silk and Cyanide is the title of a book by former Special Operations Executive cryptographer Leo Marks, describing his work during the Second World War. More fully, its title is Between Silk and Cyanide, The Story of SOE's Code War...
, about his work in cryptography. Marks joined the Armed Services and went to Bedford to train as a cryptographer.
Role at Bedford
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 ParkBletchley Park
Bletchley Park is an estate located in the town of Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire, England, which currently houses the National Museum of Computing...
; instead, he was sent to a rival organisation of the intelligence services, the recently formed Special Operations Executive
Special Operations Executive
The Special Operations Executive was a World War II organisation of the United Kingdom. It was officially formed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940, to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Axis powers and to instruct and aid local...
(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
Noor Inayat Khan
Assistant Section Officer Noor Inayat Khan / Nora Baker, GC, MBE , usually known as Noor Inayat Khan was of Indian Muslim origin...
, the Grouse/Swallow team of four Norwegian Telemark
Norwegian heavy water sabotage
The Norwegian heavy water sabotage was a series of actions undertaken by Norwegian saboteurs during World War II to prevent the German nuclear energy project from acquiring heavy water , which could be used to produce nuclear weapons...
saboteurs and his own close friend, the legendary White Rabbit, 'Tommy' Yeo-Thomas
F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas
Wing Commander Forest Frederick Edward "Tommy" Yeo-Thomas, GC, MC & Bar, Croix de guerre , Commandeur of the Légion d'honneur, was the British Special Operations Executive agent codenamed "The White Rabbit" during World War II...
. 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.
In an interview with Channel Four included in the DVD of the film Peeping Tom
Peeping Tom (film)
Peeping Tom is a 1960 British psychological thriller directed by Michael Powell and written by the World War II cryptographer and polymath Leo Marks. The title derives from the slang expression 'peeping Tom' describing a voyeur...
, Marks quoted General Eisenhower as saying that his group's work shortened the war by three months, saving countless lives.
Developments of cryptographic practice
Although personally in charge only of agent codes, the young Marks frequently walked into bureaucratic lion's dens in order to save lives in the field. One of his first challenges (stubbornly resisted by the establishment) was to phase out the use of double transposition cipherTransposition cipher
In cryptography, a transposition cipher is a method of encryption by which the positions held by units of plaintext are shifted according to a regular system, so that the ciphertext constitutes a permutation of the plaintext. That is, the order of the units is changed...
s using key
Key (cryptography)
In cryptography, a key is a piece of information that determines the functional output of a cryptographic algorithm or cipher. Without a key, the algorithm would produce no useful result. In encryption, a key specifies the particular transformation of plaintext into ciphertext, or vice versa...
s based on preselected poems. These poem ciphers
Poem code
The poem code is a simple, and insecure, cryptographic method.The method works by the sender and receiver pre-arranging a poem to use. The sender chooses a set number of words at random from the poem and gives each letter in the chosen words a number. The numbers are then used as a key for some...
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 method's complexity caused a significant number of encoding errors.
Cryptographic security was greatly enhanced by Marks's innovations, especially "worked-out keys". He was widely credited with inventing the letter one-time pad
One-time pad
In cryptography, the one-time pad is a type of encryption, which has been proven to be impossible to crack if used correctly. Each bit or character from the plaintext is encrypted by a modular addition with a bit or character from a secret random key of the same length as the plaintext, resulting...
, but while he did independently discover the method, he would later find that it was already in use at Bletchley.
Preference for original code poems
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 many poems later used by agents, the most famous being the one he gave to the agent Violette SzaboViolette Szabo
Violette Reine Elizabeth Bushell Szabo, GC, was a Second World War French-British secret agent.-Early life and marriage:...
, the poignant The Life That I Have
The Life That I Have
The Life That I Have is a short poem written by Leo Marks and used as a poem code in the Second World War....
, which gained popularity when it was used in the 1958 film about her, Carve Her Name With Pride
Carve Her Name with Pride
Carve Her Name with Pride is a 1958 British drama film based on the book of the same name by R.J. Minney. Set during World War II, the film is based on the true story of the heroism of Special Operations Executive agent Violette Szabo, with Virginia McKenna in the lead role.The film includes the...
. According to his book, Marks wrote the poem about a girlfriend, Ruth Hambro, who was killed in an air crash in Canada.
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.
Gestapo activities and “undecipherables”
GestapoGestapo
The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...
signal tracers greatly endangered clandestine radio operators, and their life expectancy averaged about six weeks. Therefore, short and less frequent transmissions from the codemaster were of considerable value. The inevitable pressure could cause agents to make mistakes encoding messages, and the established practice was for the home station to tell them to recode it (usually a reasonably safe activity) and retransmit it (very dangerous, and increasingly so the longer it took). In response to this problem, Marks established, staffed and trained a large group (based at Grendon Underwood
Grendon Underwood
Grendon Underwood is a village and civil parish in Aylesbury Vale district in Buckinghamshire, England. It is in the west of the county, close to the boundary with Oxfordshire and near the Roman road Akeman Street....
, Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan home county in South East England. The county town is Aylesbury, the largest town in the ceremonial county is Milton Keynes and largest town in the non-metropolitan county is High Wycombe....
) to cryptanalyse
Cryptanalysis
Cryptanalysis is the study of methods for obtaining the meaning of encrypted information, without access to the secret information that is normally required to do so. Typically, this involves knowing how the system works and finding a secret key...
garbled messages ("indecipherables") so that they could be dealt with in England without forcing the agent to risk retransmitting 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.
“Das Englandspiel” in the Netherlands
The Germans generally did not just execute 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, but existing means of independently checking were primitive. Marks became increasingly convinced (but unable to prove) 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' German "opposite number" in the Netherlands, Hermann Giskes, in London Calling North Pole.Reporting to Brigadier Gubbins
At one point in his book (pp. 222–3), Marks describes the memorandum he wrote detailing his conviction that the messages from the Netherlands were being sent by Germans or by agents who had been "turned." His main argument was that, despite incredibly harrowing circumstances, "not a single Dutch agent has been so overwrought that he's made a mistake in his coding...." Marks had to face Brigadier (later Sir) Colin GubbinsColin Gubbins
Major-General Sir Colin McVean Gubbins KCMG, DSO, MC was the prime mover of the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War....
:
Gubbins grills Marks. In particular he wants to know who has seen this report, who typed it (Marks did):
After SOE
He left SOE in 1946 and declined an offer of employment from the Secret Intelligence ServiceSecret Intelligence Service
The Secret Intelligence Service is responsible for supplying the British Government with foreign intelligence. Alongside the internal Security Service , the Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence Intelligence , it operates under the formal direction of the Joint Intelligence...
(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), Guns at Batasi
Guns at Batasi
Guns at Batasi is a 1964 drama film starring Richard Attenborough, Jack Hawkins, Flora Robson, John Leyton and Mia Farrow. It is set in an overseas colonial military outpost during the last days of the British Empire in East Africa....
(co-writer) (1964), Sebastian
Sebastian (1968 film)
Sebastian is a 1968 British film directed by David Greene, produced by Michael Powell, Herbert Brodkin and Gerry Fisher, and distributed by Paramount Pictures...
(1968) and Twisted Nerve
Twisted Nerve
Twisted Nerve is a 1968 British psychological thriller film about a disturbed young man, Martin, who pretends, under the name of Georgie, to be mentally retarded in order to be near Susan, a girl he has become infatuated with, killing those who get in his way.-Plot:The film opens with Martin...
(1968).
Marks also wrote the script for Michael Powell
Michael Powell (director)
Michael Latham Powell was a renowned English film director, celebrated for his partnership with Emeric Pressburger...
's highly controversial Peeping Tom
Peeping Tom (film)
Peeping Tom is a 1960 British psychological thriller directed by Michael Powell and written by the World War II cryptographer and polymath Leo Marks. The title derives from the slang expression 'peeping Tom' describing a voyeur...
(1960), the story of a serial killer
Serial killer
A serial killer, as typically defined, is an individual who has murdered three or more people over a period of more than a month, with down time between the murders, and whose motivation for killing is usually based on psychological gratification...
who films his victims while stabbing them to death. Marks also provided the voice of the Devil
Devil
The Devil is believed in many religions and cultures to be a powerful, supernatural entity that is the personification of evil and the enemy of God and humankind. The nature of the role varies greatly...
in Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
's The Last Temptation of Christ
The Last Temptation of Christ
The Last Temptation of Christ is a novel written by Nikos Kazantzakis, first published in 1953. It was first published in English in 1960. It follows the life of Jesus Christ from his perspective...
(1988).
In 1998, Marks published a book about his work in SOE — Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's Story 1941-1945
Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's Story 1941-1945
Between Silk and Cyanide is the title of a book by former Special Operations Executive cryptographer Leo Marks, describing his work during the Second World War. More fully, its title is Between Silk and Cyanide, The Story of SOE's Code War...
. 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
Elena Gaussen
Elena Gaussen is a London-based portrait painter. She was divorced from screenwriter and cryptographer Leo Marks in 2000. Gaussen produces portraits and landscapes in a variety of media including pencil sketches...
in 1966, a marriage that lasted until shortly before his death at home, from cancer, in January 2001.