English cryptographer and scriptwriter?.
Born in London the son of a antiquarian. Demonstrated his skill at cryptography from an early age. He joined the Armed Services in January 1942, and went to Bedford? to train as a cryptographer - of his class he was the only one not to end up at Bletchley Park; instead, he was sent to the recently formed Special Operations Executive (SOE).
He played a major role in the construction and security of SOE cyphers (initially double transposition ciphers). Especially by his re-invention of the "one-time pad", the re-organisation of the emergency poem cyphers, and the recruitment of a special team (based at Grendon Underwood, Buckinghamshire) to decode indecipherable messages.
With the emergency poem cyphers his solution was to use original poems instead of famous ones. Many of these he wrote himself, the best known being that given to the agent Violette Szabo, The Life That I Have. The poem was used in the film made about Szabo, Carve Her Name With Pride (1958).
But he was often angry at the carelessness he found in SOE. Marks had uncovered the German penetration of the SOE operations in Holland, the so-called Englandspiel. But his suspicions were disgarded and up to fifty agents went unnecessarily to capture, torture and death. Marks had briefed many agents himself, including his close friend Forest 'Tommy' Yeo-Thomas.
He left SOE in 1946 and declined an offer of employment from 'MI6'. 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), Sebastian (1967) and Twisted Nerve (1968). But he also wrote the script for the intelligent and highly controversial Peeping Tom (1960). He also wrote a book about his work in SOE - Between Silk and Cyanide : A Codemaker's War 1941-1945 (1998).
He married the portrait painter Elena Gaussen in 1966, a marriage that lasted until shortly before his death.
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