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of other detailed lies on which their survival depended. I was determined to give them a code which would protect them instead of their having to protect it, or I would leave SOE.
    I cleared what remained of my throat. 'Do the country sections ever admit if their agents are caught?'
    That held him, and he asked me what I meant. Unsure of how much of this would be filtered back to Ozanne, I said that the security checks SOE was using seemed to be very unreliable; and it was curious that although certain agents, particularly the Dutch, consistently omitted their security checks their country sections ignored the implication that they might have been caught.
    Looking at me intently, Hambro asked how long I had been with SOE. When I told him two months, he instructed me to continue asking questions until I found the right answers, his tone suggesting that he knew this would not be easy. He then said that it was time I went home, and strode down the corridor like an elephant in slippers. An hour later he was running his bath.
    SOE regarded the Signals directorate as a benign post office which delivered the mail more or less on time, could be given a kick in the transmitters if it didn't, but never caused anyone the slightest bother. The last thing the country sections expected was that a junior member of that inoffensive directorate would call on them—on the absurd pretext that the new codes he was devising must be shaped to meet their long-term requirements. Many times during that fact-finding tour I felt as if I were travelling across Europe in a carry-cot with a suspect visa.
    No matter which country section I visited, everything was in short supply except confusion, and it was easy to mis-assess country section officers because the constant need for improvisation made it difficult to distinguish the few who understood their jobs from the majority who didn't.
    That was the marvellous and the terrifying part of SOE in its adolescence: it was pitted and pockmarked with improbable people doing implausible things for imponderable purposes and succeeding by coincidence. One thing alone made it worth the price of the ticket. It was at the low levels at which I mixed—amongst the people SOE hadn't really know it had—that the excitement of discovery really lay. It peaked and stayed there whenever I met the proud holder of the title 'Chairman of the Awkward Squad'—Flight Lieutenant Yeo-Thomas, who was one day to change his name by Resistance Movement deed poll to 'the White Rabbit'.
    'Our Tommy' certainly wasn't everyone's Tommy. Many people in SOE disliked him intensely but that wasn't his only recommendation. He spoke bilingual French and had spent most of his life in France amongst Frenchmen. In 1939 he was general manager of one if the world's most famous fashion houses—Molyneux of Paris, then t the haute of its couture. He 'persuaded' the RAF to let him enlist as a ranker at the age of thirty-eight. Three years later it was SOE's turn and he joined RF section as pilot-officer.
    Not even SOE could miss his immediate impact on the Duke Street intransigents. To his superior's astonishment he was able to criticize the Free French to their faces without causing a national temper tantrum and was the only Englishman actually welcomed into Duke Street by de Gaulle's fearsome right fist, young Colonel Passy. After Churchill, the man Tommy most admired was de Gaulle, and the Free French respected him for it even if Baker Street didn't. But there was one aspect of Tommy's conduct which worried SOE's hierarchy even more than his loyalty to Duke Street. He had earned his coveted tie because he refused to obey SOE's house rule forbidding officers in different country sections from exchanging information. Tommy was always prepared to compare notes on the Gestapo, and similar obscenities, with anyone in SOE of whatever nationality; in the insularity which passed for security, few responded.
    He hadn't waited till the Christmas after next