Leo Marks

Leo Marks
Leo Marks in 2000, at the opening of the Violette Szabo Museum, Wormelow Tump
Born	Leopold Samuel Marks (1920-09-24)24 September 1920 London
Died	15 January 2001(2001-01-15) (aged 80) London
Occupation	Cryptographer, writer and poet
Known for	The Life That I Have (poem) Peeping Tom (screenplay) Between Silk and Cyanide (book)
Spouse(s)	Elena Gaussen (m. 1966–2000)

Leopold Samuel "Leo" Marks, MBE (24 September 1920 – 15 January 2001) was an English cryptographer during the Second World War. He headed the codes office supporting resistance agents in occupied Europe for the secret Special Operations Executive organisation. After the war, Marks became a playwright and screenwriter, writing scripts that frequently utilised his war-time cryptographic experiences. He wrote the script for Peeping Tom, the controversial film directed by Michael Powell which had a disastrous effect on Powell's career, but has subsequently been described by Martin Scorsese as a masterpiece. In 1998, towards the end of his life, Marks published a personal history of his experiences during the war, Between Silk and Cyanide, which was critical of the leadership of SOE.

Marks was the son of Benjamin Marks, the joint owner of Marks & Co, an antiquarian bookseller situated in Charing Cross Road, London. He was introduced at an early age to cryptography when his father showed him Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Gold-Bug". From this early interest, he demonstrated his skill at codebreaking by deciphering the secret price codes which his father wrote inside the covers of books. The bookshop subsequently became famous as a result of the book 84, Charing Cross Road, which was based on correspondence between American writer Helene Hanff and the shop's chief buyer, Frank Doel.

Marks was conscripted in January 1942, and trained as a cryptographer; apparently he demonstrated the ability to complete one week's work in decipherment exercise in a few hours. Unlike the rest of his intake, who were sent to the main British codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park, Marks was regarded as a misfit and he was assigned the newly formed Special Operations Executive in Baker Street, which was set up to train agents to operate behind enemy lines in occupied Europe and to assist local resistance groups. SOE has been described as "a mixture of brilliant brains and bungling amateurs". Marks wrote that he had an inauspicious arrival at SOE when it took him all day to decipher a code he had been expected to finish in 20 minutes, because, not atypically, SOE had forgotten to supply the cipher key.