A WWII spy who hid codes in her knitting

The actual quote from Phyllis was " I always carried knitting because my codes were on a piece of silk".

There's no need for knitting to be involved in the encoding. She had a message (unclear if it was a message she received or her own personal knowledge; likely her own knowledge from observing Nazi/German soldiers), and she had a silk with the code keys, and she had a transmission station.

it's unclear from the images in the shop but the code isn't the circuit diagram-ish things but a table in the middle, which reproduces this, an actual SOE silk code: http://www.jproc.ca/crypto/silkcode_chart_b.jpg

This is apparently a 'Worked Out Key' cipher, not a OTP as mentioned in the article, but both were in use due to Leo Marks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Marks#:~:text=Developments....

(in fact, here's a photo of Leo with one of these code tables https://www.historynet.com/was-this-the-uks-worst-spy-failur... )

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Grandcl%C3%A9ment

Not to detract from her courage, just to clarify: She was 23, posing as a teenager behind enemy lines. TFA says she was 20 when she joined the WAAF in '41 and started that mission May '44.

Steve Bellovin wrote a review of "Between Silk and Cyanide" back on the old cryptography@c2.net mailing list that prompted me to buy the book: https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@c2.net/msg04572.ht... (The whole thread is good, BTW.)

The seriousness of the topic really left a mark with me (thinking about agents being tortured and killed as a result of poor opsec or cryptographic vulnerabilities). I'm glad that the work I do doesn't have those consequences.

If I remember it right, Leo Marks is the one who proved to the French their codes were completely bogus by breaking them, in front of their eyes with pen and paper. I bet they hated it, but it may have been highly beneficial it was irrefutable.

To be fair, the title makes it sound like this. The article does mentions the silk code and how it was hidden.

She used a knitting needle to insert a silk cypher sheet into a shoelace, which she used to tie her hair. Since the knitting needle was necessary to stash the rolled up sheet of silk in the shoelace, she'd carry her knitting as cover.

Being a young woman, according to the wikipedia, she was also able to entertain conversations with the young german soldiers to gather more information.

It looks like the knitting kit was just a clever way of having a place to hide the OTP codes she used and keeping track of the ones already used. Also, according to the wikipedia she was once detained by the germans for interrogation, but they didn't think of checking her hair tie.

Pretty clever IMHO, not to mention the mind-boggling level of courage.

Yeah, we're already seeing this with Holocaust denialism - as ever more and more witnesses die, revisionists have an ever easier game denying or downplaying what happened, and with no small "thanks" to the US who never bothered to follow the European example and criminalize Holocaust denial.

At least for the Holocaust, we have the physical evidence kept alive in the former death camp sites... but what about those atrocities that didn't leave much physical evidence?

> Will Hitler continue to be the go-to example of prime evil in people's minds then?

I think so, as long as people believe in holocaust and no one else tops him.

> And eventually, will they even stop learning about it?

We do still learn about pharaohs ... and cowboys for some reason. Some history just gets immortalized in tropes.

> Will Hitler continue to be the go-to example of prime evil in people's minds then? I'm not so certain.

Prior to this it seems to have been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Magdeburg (someone once asked the question on Reddit "what the go-to example of war horror was before WW2")

Once the TV cameras re-enter eastern Ukraine perhaps we will see. Or perhaps not, given that it will be too horrific to show on social media or TV anywhere.

You're wrong there. They won't because governments will move to ban them so that they can carry on snooping. It's more likely that the texts will be simutaneously uploaded onto a publicly accessible database, which will be encouraged because "only criminals have something they want to hide".

Vietnam lasted longer, but only was a salient issue for a much smaller fraction of the world's population at the time, so probably less than a tenth of the person-years lived in the shadow of WWII were similarly affected by the Vietnam War.

Unless there is a WWIII, the second World War will probably be the war of the human species, and a significant part of our history for centuries to come.

Funny enough it's been publicly known for about that long.

  With just one blue cotton dress to her name she pedalled around the countryside selling soap to mostly German soldiers, crossing fields on foot to where she had hidden another bicycle. The Gestapo and SS were everywhere. And to add to the confusion and danger a double agent was working in the area. The SOE operative was friendly and talkative whenever she met German soldiers – "I'd talk so much about anything and everything, trying to be 'helpful' and they'd get sick of me" - and was constantly moving through the countryside where she was transmitting the information so urgently needed by the Allied Command.

  "I always carried knitting because my codes were on a piece of silk – I had about 2000 I could use. When I used a code I would just pinprick it to indicate it had gone. I wrapped the piece of silk around a knitting needle and put it in a flat shoe lace which I used to tie my hair up."

  Once she was loaded into a truck along with other locals and taken to the police station for questioning. "I can remember being taken to the station and a female soldier made us take our clothes off to see if we were hiding anything. She was looking suspiciously at my hair so I just pulled my lace off and shook my head. That seemed to satisfy her. I tied my hair back up with the lace- it was a nerve-wracking moment."