Trade/Craft — Ceridwen Hall

A writer is essentially a spy. - Anne Sexton, “The Black Art”

Thank God the loudest Place he made

Is licensed to be still

- Emily Dickinson (1225)

bridge

The writer plants the spy on a bridge; we watch her cross and vanish. What we imagine we know is rendered through film and fiction, laced with sex, driven by gadgets. We see spies drink their iconic martinis, recognize them by acronym and wink. Most notorious spies were invented by other spies: Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden (alias Somerville), Graham Greene’s double agents, and John LeCarre’s. And, of course, Ian Fleming’s James Bond, who is so implausibly sleek and visible he functions as a kind of smokescreen, a mesmerizing legend, obscuring the discreet habits of active case officers and agents. 

Undetected spies operate under meticulous cover; their stories are perfect, their pasts at once vague and watertight. Spying, like the effort of writing, is a performance that succeeds by going unobserved.  Lies fold neatly into details, into facts. In a world with lots of information and little privacy, I find myself obsessed with pre-digital espionage—both the cloak and dagger myths and the formal protocols hedging the release of secrets. 

Spies confess to their handlers; writers to their readers. In 2021, every encounter feels fraught and choregraphed. Even among family, I catch myself hesitating, masking my loneliness, scripting a performance of sociability. Having returned to my hometown mid-pandemic, I am trying to embed myself in weekly routines. I venture forth as a kind of double-agent—ambivalent in my deceit, but seeking relevant intelligence. 

countermeasures 

We watch our spy cross the bridge, cross the street, and vanish by rapid turns: left, right, and left again. Has she shed her tail? 

The spy’s loneliness, her paranoia and caution, her purposeful anonymity, compel. A spy must assume she is being followed, being watched. The writer must assume a reader. For me, though, the spy’s true appeal lies in her ability to move with stealth—even grace—between inner reality and outer world. In her realm, modesty enables audacity. 

The spy seems to walk at random, entering a café and exiting through a second door, doubling back, circling a church, zigzagging across a park. All to ensure she is not being followed or watched. The Soviets called this ‘dry-cleaning’; the Americans called it a ‘blackout’. (Spying has its own lexicon. To think like a spy, one must adopt a changed and charged relationship to language, trusting code names, fetishizing prearranged phrases.) 

Certain, now, that she is alone, the spy uses her time in obscura to collect or drop intelligence. The writer too must carve out time to practice her craft. And must shake off a social tail of distraction. I circle the neighborhood with my dog, I shuffle seemingly at random through my notes, looking for a place to begin. I hunker down at my desk, hiding from potential interruptions. In my journal I describe failing to complete this ritual as a “tactical sin”. 

family business 

Spies are notorious loners—tech savvy, self-sufficient world-travelers who thrive on solitude and danger. And yet, spying is rarely a solo endeavor. Our spy might work alone, but she acts in concert with a network of agents and assets. A team of specialists provide the costumes and tools that enable her to gather and transfer intelligence.     

More tellingly, spying is often a family business. The wives and children of British and American intelligence officers picnicked in Moscow parks during the Cold War, sometimes receiving boxes of candy (actually filled with military intelligence) from Russian assets. Even the dog might be in on the game, providing cover for visits to outdoor drop sites in bad weather. On the flip side, a spy’s relatives can become liabilities—hindrances to secrecy, or even hostages held to ensure the spy’s cooperation. Within a family or among friends, the spy’s secret work remains a barrier to trust, an unbreachable silence. 

What makes the spy lonely isn’t lack of connection, but lack of transparency. Spy stories appeal to us, in part, because they make visible the reality that every relationship entails risk and every stance entails sacrifice. We read into the loneliness of spies because we recognize our own lives—full of distance and compromise. 

The writer’s solitude too is notorious. But her work depends on a network of readers and editors, research and ideas, other writers of all stripes, living and dead. Her loneliness is punctuated by communication and silence, amplified by the risk of alienating a loved one. I can’t imagine my work—my obsessions with absence and nearness, travel and stillness—without the influence of my siblings and parents. Words are an odd business—expanding into bridges, contracting into barriers. Words are a family business too, inviting the writer to scrutinize the circumstances under which she learned to speak and the people who taught her. What is the difference between revelation and betrayal? 

The writer tiptoes toward the truth; the spy traffics it. 

brush pass

Solitude itself is not the spy’s end goal. Near the fountain, she palms a note from a seeming stranger in a grey suit—an act fleeting as inspiration, dangerous as an idea. 

detail work

Spying requires artistry and meticulous dexterity. Any stray detail—a fumbled brush pass, a startled word spoken in the wrong language—can betray a whole operation. Not only must the spy’s technique and tradecraft be solid, her cover story—down to her false siblings and childhood address—must ring true. A good pseudonym resembles the spy’s actual name so that if the spy reacts to her real name by mistake it will seem as though she has simply misheard. She must always look and sound innocent. 

During WWII, SOE (Special Operations Executive, the secret British agency charged with running spies and aiding resistance movements in Nazi-occupied nations) hired costumers and makeup artists to help prepare agents for undercover work in France; Virginia Hall (no relation) learned to draw wrinkles on her own face in order to move through the French countryside as an elderly woman. She already walked with a limp because of her wooden leg and stooped a bit under the weight of her radio—all the details fit. 

I imagine scrutiny, afraid of striking the wrong note. Can I trust my discernment? Perfectionism colludes with silence. I convince myself my life is not exciting enough to interest anyone and yet too messy to narrate; I envy the spy her story’s fictive glide. She succeeds by shedding attention; I must hold it on the page. 

When the spy reaches the park, every detail must fit: the grey-suited man’s hat, the paper tucked under his left arm, the umbrella over his right, the burbling fountain. Otherwise, the writer worries the spy will not approach, will default to an alternate meeting. Both are guided by doubt. "Dubito, ergo sum" ("I doubt, therefore I survive") was the motto of SOE agents hroughout France. The writer too must learn to test and wrangle her doubts, to determine which indicate genuine flaws, which are decoys. 

dead drop

Erase the grey-suited man. The spy turns east, begins counting trees. Under the fourth she pauses, pretends to dislodge a pebble from her shoe. She finds instructions hidden in the body of a taxidermized mouse. Or she leaves a coded message in it. 

This is, ultimately, a contactless transaction. The spy must trust in the arranged protocol. The writer hopes the reader will understand reports submitted from the censored citadel of the mind. 

deception

Our spy circles the park and turns past a row of shops. Though she seems to be studying her reflection on the glass, she is, in fact, looking over her shoulder, locating her tail. The spy returns to work; the writer turns from desk to world. Both lead double lives. The spy’s routine in office or laboratory provides access to coveted information, justifies her proximity to secrets.  The writer’s social life, and her domestic sphere, are a cover story for a hidden negotiation with fear and truth, a constant monitoring of thoughts transmitted into words. 

The spy smiles at a colleague and photographs his desk with one click of the camera hidden in her pen. The writer listens and listens to her sister. 

betrayal (1)

The narrative divides our loyalties; the lyric tangles them. I drift between modes and between decades.

intelligence

Both writer and spy depend on patterns (noticing them, varying them) and risk paranoia. We are knowledge thieves, many of us, in this era, or scavengers. We steal or borrow—whether blueprints or facts and anecdotes. Intelligence is both interior (a capacity in our minds) and external (a set of potentially useful facts). It is therefore rich terrain for metaphor. And rumor. 

The spy works in the open with sleight of hand; the writer works in privacy, but must assume her searches leave a bank of data. Obtaining intel is only a brief thrill though. The real trick is determining what is relevant, useable, and how to make sense of it—registering the curiosity and skepticism of a distant reader, the needs of an inner honing device.   

codes/poems

From the relative safety of her kitchen, the spy unfolds a page and finds an urgent threat. The danger must be converted to a string of letters so the spy dissects a novel or poem, composes a warning. The writer must not flinch from this transaction, but instead watch for what she can borrow. Both deal in signal and static. 

During WWII, poem codes provided spies with a sense of safety (because no written material would be found if the agent was searched), but they were also easy for the enemy to break. To use a poem code, British SOE agents chose five words from a memorized poem and numbered their letters before scrambling and juxtaposing the plain text of their message. If, however, an enemy cryptographer managed to mathematically reconstruct those chosen five words, then they would have a good shot at identifying the source poem (from the Book of Common Prayer, more often than not, or the collected works of Tennyson, Shakespeare, or Poe) and cracking every other message based on that poem. For instance, ‘light,’ ‘low,’ ‘flame,’ ‘verge,’ and ‘strife’ could point a well-read decryption analyst back to Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” (section L): 

Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is racked with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.

Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.

Rather dark and on-the-nose for someone on a deadly mission, but a favorite of one agent. The very form that makes the poem easier to memorize also makes it easier for an analyst to identify or reconstruct it.

And agents, though they were supposed to choose randomly, tended to gravitate toward particular words—shorter ones and those with an emotional resonance—increasing the odds that enemy codebreakers could detect a pattern. Aware of this danger, the writer guards against her tendency to favor particular sounds, to develop predictable ticks. 

Leo Marks (SOE’s wartime cryptographer, later a screenwriter) tried to bolster the security of poem codes by writing original poems for SOE to use. Sexual imagery and Hitler jokes featured prominently because these made poems easy for agents to memorize and were unlikely to be predicted by German codebreakers. Marks’ poems, often a mixture of rhymed couplets and free verse, were sometimes bad, but not lifeless; his tone could swing from melodrama to playful singsong, but he seems never to have been too clever to feel deeply. Consider, for instance, the poem he gave his friend Tommy (SOE agent Forest Frederick Edward Yeo-Thomas, codenamed “SEAHORSE” and known by the Germans as the “White Rabbit”) to use as a signal that he had been caught and was transmitting under duress: 

They cannot know
What makes you as you are
Nor can they hear
Those voices from afar
Which whisper to you
You are not alone. 

They cannot reach 
That inner core of you
The long before of you
The child inside
Deep deep inside
Which gives the man his pride.
What you are
They can never be
And what they are
Will soon be history. 

It at once conveys a playful note of optimism—the enemy “will soon be history”—and carries an earnest and direct statement of solidarity: “you are not alone.” It’s also a dire prediction that the agent will be captured and tortured. Like other code poems, it uses simple language, hard rhymes, and repetition for easy memorization—all qualities that lend it a youthful tone; it’s a poem that “the child inside” could learn by rote. And yet, it’s also an assertion of SOE’s (and friendship’s) capacity to communicate across distance AND an acknowledgement that human motivation remains an unknowable and inscrutable “inner core” shaped by early experiences. It was written to serve a very specific communication function, but it has the tension and multivalence of a poem. It’s coiled to strike the reader. 

Knowing his work would be kept top secret may have freed Marks from writers’ block. But what a terrible luxury. He jotted lines for the “ditty box” between briefing agents, most of whom would, he knew, be caught and killed. He carried the guilt of vicarious risk. I too am isolated from danger, working at a privileged distance. I write in squeezed moments, between tasks, as though sending a brief to some future self. But, hoping my work will not remain secret, I cringe and delete. With an imagined spy waiting, I dread being obvious, heavy-handed. And I dread embellishment, but also fear being sleight. Or seeming so. Subtlety risks becoming a cipher, arcane to the reader. I err, I suspect, on all sides. 

indecipherables

Even when given original (and therefore more secure) poems, SOE agents, under tremendous stress and time pressure, were prone to coding errors. They misspelled words from their poems (turning ‘heaven’ to ‘heavan’) or swapped in homonyms (‘write’ for ‘right’; ‘sleight’ for ‘slight’ as I’ve done above). Or, midway through the enciphering process, they glanced up too hastily and shifted all the numbers left or right, scrambling the message. Jumbled messages were so common that Marks trained a team of FANYs (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry—a British women’s auxiliary) to crack these so-called indecipherables. This team worked against the clock; if a message couldn’t be deciphered within a day, the SOE agent would be ordered to re-transmit it. Every transmission not only risked the agent’s life (teams of Abwehr officers drove around hunting for radio signals; the life expectancy of a wireless operator in occupied France was a matter of weeks), but also the security of the poem code. Any poem, even an original composition, could be reconstructed (thereby breaking the code) if enemies obtained enough transmissions and devoted enough brainpower to the problem. And the messages themselves were essential and time-sensitive: reports on German troop movement and requests for supplies needed by local resistance groups. For these reasons, re-transmit orders were to be avoided at all costs. SOE kept records of agents’ code training and referred back to them when agents sent indecipherables from the field; knowing the kinds of mistakes an agent tended to make helped the decoding team to discover patterns. 

Despite the work they created, Marks viewed agents’ errors as a reassuring sign: the unconscious having its say in a moment of stress. Marks’ view of coding behavior was informed by his reading of Freud (“the great decoder of unconscious signals”).  Marks developed what he called “the Psychopathology of SOE Life,” viewing agents’ spelling mistakes not as random misfires, but as urgent reports from their unconscious. Falling back into a youthful spelling error, for instance, might signal a wish to return to the safety of childhood. And, given the state of Europe, unconsciously replacing ‘peace’ with ‘piece’ might hint at a more accurate perception of the situation. If an agent suddenly began transmitting flawless messages, Marks would worry (often correctly) that they had been replaced by a German impersonator (who would be transmitting under far less stress and with plenty of time to check his English for errors, having tortured the code out of the captured SOE agent and poured himself a cup of tea confiscated from a British air drop meant for the local resistance group). Then again, the German impersonator’s unconscious could be used against him; SOE radio operators (based in England) could test an agent that SOE suspected was compromised or captured by signing off ‘HH’ (for ‘Heil Hitler’) and observing whether the agent reflexively signed ‘HH’ back—as a German was likely to do. 

doubt

Perhaps the spy hesitates. Writing in invisible ink, she can’t see her errors—her verbal instincts—and wonders what they might obscure, what they might reveal. 

family business (2) 

When I ran Marks’ theory about indecipherables by my parents—both psychoanalysts—they found it fascinating and convincing. Listening for nuance is the family trade. Dreams too are indecipherables—messages from the unconscious whose meaning depends on the context of the dreamer’s life. “It’s not the dream itself,” Dad says for the hundredth time as we dissect ours (a childhood habit we slowly realized was unique to our family) over a holiday breakfast; “you can only interpret the way dream is told, the story the dreamer makes of it”. Not the message itself, but the words slipped into it or erased from it, the secrets drifting out before the kitchen door of the brain swings shut. 

Now I too find myself in sympathy with Marks’ interpretation. My journal is full of indecipherables: drafts scrawled and puzzled over, crossed out, reconstructed from a single viable line, annotated, crossed out again, attempted again, finally growing clearer, shedding static. My accidents, often, are doorways—‘prey’ becomes ‘pray’, ‘make’ reveals ‘ache’—as if my hands and ears conspire together against a censoring brain. If I spelled perfectly, I would seem to transmit more crisply, but with less meaning. Perhaps when I wrote I fear being sleight, I meant I fear my own capacity for deception, fear the tricks I might play on the reader, the lies I might tell myself. Maybe my hands know they are cleverer than my brain. No, they are cleavers. 

My upbringing—an inadvertent training in spotting signifying details and tracing their emotional resonance—is at once a liability and an asset. I read metaphor into gesture and accident, into spilled milk and wrong turns. Associations leap into life and across my work. Home (my parents have a home practice) habituated me to a strange mix of discretion and intuition, of unacknowledged social knowledge, which felt and still feels ordinary to me—a routine of doubled life. How often I have morphed from daughter to ad hoc secretary, speaking across a polite distance and pointing patients toward the office door. How often too I have turned an analytic gaze on my own actions—flagging lost keys as an attempt to abdicate responsibility. Sometimes, I overinterpret a brief text message; sometimes I feel overexposed to a knowing world. But it was also a gift to be raised by parents who believed in the decipherability, and the urgency, of dreams—transmissions from across the border of consciousness, coded in story and vision—in a home that acknowledged the mind’s capacity to keep secrets from itself, and to wield and reveal them. 

poems/codes

The spy must not only write secrets, but also read them. Her brain is a reverse mirror. When a reply arrives, she spins the letters into numbers into other letters under the flickering kitchen light. She finishes by memorizing and burning the plaintext. 

Both poet and spy work in a dialect of scavenged words, borrowed techniques—obscure, but also in conversation with other modes of speech. In addition to the codes and poems Marks contributed, SOE used the secret telegraphic codes of private banks. It also sought to hire coders who liked crossword puzzles and music, who knew popular slang and could recognize a line from Keats or Tennyson. Math skills, Marks observed, were comparatively unimportant; these could be retaught. 

The poem may conspire with ambiguity or nuance, inviting the reader to participate in meaning-making. The coded message, however, must indicate only one meaning; it wouldn’t do to leave the location and timing of a planned invasion up to the reader’s inference.  Although both poem and code invite deciphering, the poem can only be broken (if we want to call it broken, rendered whole in a reader’s mind) on an individual level. It defies systemization; it breaks-in to the reader’s head. The code can shatter a host of messages into naked statements. 

betrayal (2)

Codes break. Words unmask the voice. Language fails to protect our bodies.

For instance, a common trick for testing whether someone might be a spy is to give a brief command (such as “please sit down”) in a language they aren’t supposed to know and see if they respond automatically.          

Let us suppose our spy mutes her limbs and passes this test. But, knowing she is under suspicion, she catches the eye of the grey-suited man on her way home and drops an orange peel beside a waste bin, canceling the evening’s meeting. 

conventions

Every interchange must be scripted to ensure security. This requires little stretch of the imagination; the writer has learned to expect pre-arranged security questions when accessing an account from a new device. Meaning can be attached to any figment of one’s past, trust to any combination of objects. This is character; this is covert speech. Even clothing and accessories are laden with significance, used to telegraph allegiance. 

The spy identifies her newly designated go-between by the following: brown hat, umbrella under left arm, half-eaten apple in right hand. She approaches to give her parole: “Where did you buy that apple?” He answers: “They are sold by the pound.” An exact answer, but not a direct one. Coded language sheds logic, glides on association; the spies’ exchange sounds like conversation, but functions like a passkey. They nod and go by separate paths to the same bench. 

Spy, writer, and reader—all are hungry for clues, for patterns we can trust. It’s tempting to divide spies into two kinds: those who betray their own countries from within and those who infiltrate foreign powers on behalf of their home countries—traitors and seekers. But fog and rain tend to mark the pivotal scenes; smoke wafts from burned documents. Every decision rises from a murky compound of wish and reason. 

double agent

My familial and writerly loyalties are split and knotted. At gatherings, I watch and eavesdrop while performing a version of myself: someone armored in usefulness and quiet. A holiday is like a diplomatic summit—full of cheer and good intentions, but with an underlying tension, an implied script. 

I clear dishes, walking between rooms; I witness and witness. The whole house might as well be wired and only with my mother have I explicitly discussed my role as double agent: daughter and poet. After all, she too is accustomed to juggling identities—mother and doctor and host and step-mother—and responsibilities. Only she thinks to ask, as we struggle to wrestle the turkey from roasting pan to platter and nearly drop it, “will you write about this?” Or, as she baits an electric mousetrap, “this”? Or, as my dad envisions a picture-perfect holiday for my half-sisters’ visit and the rest of us scramble to keep up with the cooking this entails, “this”? Maybe she is just trying to understand how I think.

“I don’t know,” I tell her. Which usually means yes, but not right away. 

betrayal (3) 

I can rationalize here. I’m better than Amazon Alexa. I listen and write with the intent to understand my siblings (or my relationship with my siblings), not to catalogue their needs and sell them things. And, though I feel I’m playing a part, the script is, in theory, a simple one: a happy holiday or birthday.  My father always wants to give my older half-sisters (and their children) a perfect celebration to make up for the moments he missed during their childhood. But my family isn’t, so far as I know, encircling a Big Secret, just the usual private hurts and miscommunications, rivalries and guilts, that complicate any group. Just the sense of historical contingency that haunts any family after a divorce and second marriage—a dynamic where no one quite feels like she ‘belongs’ in this past-made-present, where loyalty splits in stray sentences.

In my family it seems there is no neutral intelligence. Just to gather information feels like taking a side or hinting that there are (their/our, says my unconscious) sides. To ask who is coming to Thanksgiving is to risk implying that some family members are more welcome than others. And questions about the past—which I often feel compelled to ask—can be read as challenges or threats to the harmony of the present. 

“I don’t want to ‘use’ any of it,” I write, but all of it has shaped me—the years spent watching my sisters travel between parents, the need to see my home from different perspectives, the need to check family legends for political undercurrents and to read into one of us saying “our parents” versus “Dad and your Mom”, the different narratives about who influenced my sisters’ collage plans depending on who I ask. No wonder my sisters and my mother and I bonded over our shared love of Alias, watching double agent Sydney Bristow juggle espionage, friendship, grad school, plus the task of learning her own complicated family history from her parents (also spies and sometimes enemies). In our favorite scene, Sydney’s mother attempts to guide the three of them safely through a minefield that she herself set years before; it’s a funny satire of a trust exercise, a commentary on the unreliability of memory, and also a perfect metaphor for the ways in which past events can detonate new family conflicts.  No wonder I’m still obsessed with spies, their techniques for crossing unnoticed, for speaking a safely-disguised truth. I’m like a sleeper agent, listening for an invisible signal, treacherously permeable to language and memory.

detachment 

The spy is instructed to cultivate detachment, not to be drawn in, but the story only fascinates us if she cracks. A perfect spy is a boring machine. A good one divides her mind. At moments of great danger, she appears utterly relaxed; walking slowly to avoid drawing attention, she folds a small essential act (depositing a miniature camera into an agent’s pocket) into a large and showy gesture (transferring her shopping bag to the opposite shoulder).  She walks on as though nothing has happened, her success invisible. 

motivation 

The writer must know what drives the spy. What makes her willing to risk loneliness, to transmit secret after secret. “All spies,” writes biographer Ben Macintyre, “crave undetected influence, that secret compensation: the ruthless exercise of private power. A degree of intellectual snobbery is common to most, the secret sense of knowing important things unknown to the person standing next to you at the bus stop. In part, spying is an act of the imagination.” The spy wants to escape through the mind’s tunnels and to reshape the world by (selectively) revealing secrets. The writer too crawls the mind’s tunnels, carving paths of lies and facts, chalking a map. From the brain’s perspective, to imagine is to act. 

betrayal (4)

Having trained myself to fly under the radar, I want to be read but not heard. A nervous agent, I tuck my inner world underground and burrow, leave behind a small pile. 

acts

The writer conjures a spy climbing museum steps and scanning the crowd. The reader too is watching. 

Is art itself is motivation for espionage? An excuse? Many Cold war spies cited the freedom of expression, the music, they heard in Western Europe as a factor in their decision to steal intelligence for the West. According to Ben Macintyre, the double agent Oleg Gordievsky viewed his decade of spying for Britain as “the act of a dissident, not a turncoat” and said: “Just as Shostakovich, the composer, fought back with music and Sulzhenitsyn, the writer, fought back with words, so I, the KGB man, could only operate through my own intelligence world.” 

The writer sketches for the spy a slow awakening or a sudden rift between self and state. Whatever her position, she must now hide what she knows—and find a way to reveal it.

betrayal (5) 

I question my integrity, interrogate my consciousness. My family jokes about my stealth—how I soundlessly climb stairs or sit so still that I am overlooked. This isn’t furtiveness,  but a habit of self-containment, a way of paying attention without drawing it. It’s a shy child’s instinct honed at school and home, a strategy for vanishing from chores and parties to read and write. But maybe I am in denial, the ultimate double agent. To be read is to be seen. Just when I think I have evaded the giveaway signs of voice and body, they surface in an image or pun. To write is to encode experiences in a decipherable form—transmissions that breach the noise of family life. 

compartmentalization

The spy must compartmentalize, segregate her various roles and labor; the writer instead collapses distance, steps deliberately on metaphor’s trap. The essay hones ambivalence. So too, eventually, does the spy’s story; she loses her ability to divide the world into sides. The compartments are permeable. 

The spy, halfway across the bridge, glances back. 

Bibliography

Foot, M.R.D. SOE in France: An Account of the Work of the British Special Operations Executive in France 1940-1944. H.M. Stationary Office, 1966

Macintyre, Ben. The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War. Crown, 2018

Macintyre, Ben. Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy. Crown, 2018

Marks, Leo. Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemakers War, 1941-1945. Touchtstone, 1998. 

Purnell, Sonia. A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II. Penguin Books, 2019.

***

Ceridwen Hall is a poet, essayist, and book coach. She holds a PhD from the University of Utah and is the author of two chapbooks: Automotive (Finishing Line Press) and Excursions (Train Wreck Press). Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Pembroke Magazine, Tar River Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, and other journals. You can find her at www.ceridwenhall.com.