The Weasel Code

As is often said, especially by those no-one has asked for their opinion, that there are some moments in the affairs of humankind that are just far too dull for anyone to bother remembering.

However, the Weasel Code Incident – as it became known – is not one of them, which is a bit obvious really; otherwise, no-one would have bothered remembering it, let alone giving it such a memorable name.

As for the weasel, Benjy, why he in particular is associated with this particular incident is one of those twists of fate that make reality seem far-fetched and way beyond the imaginings of mere fiction writers.

It all began back in the early years of WWII. As is now well-known, but at the time was one of the greatest secrets of the war, the Allies had cracked the German’s ultra-secret – and they though ultra-secure – Enigma code. However, even to this day, very few knew that the Allies had also cracked the super secret German Weasel Code, through the use of their captured German code weasel, Benjy.

Benjy had been the highly-trained code weasel of a German general captured outside Tobruk in the latter stages of the desert war. Unfortunately for the German war machine, the General, Herr Kaput, had not had the time to feed Benjy the fatal dose of rice and treacle prepared for each code weasel to prevent it falling into enemy hands before capture.

What had not been revealed up until now, however, was that it was a raid on the general’s headquarters specifically mounted to capture a live code weasel by the SAS that brought Benjy into Allied hands.

The SAS, the Special Accountancy Service, had for some time been aware of the number of orders and invoices the German army generated for supplies of rice and treacle and Allied intelligence suspected that this was something to do with the use of code weasels by the Germans.

Before the outbreak of war, some Polish mathematicians had speculated that any code generated by weasels fed rice and treacle would be virtually unbreakable. It was this idea that the German high command had noticed and copied. This made it essential that the Allies capture a code weasel as early as possible in the war, so they could break this code.

AS we all now know, radar was an offshoot of the British search for a reliable rice and treacle detector. The early experimental radar could – of course – detect when a weasel went pop, but by then it was obviously too late to capture that weasel, at least without a dustpan and brush. Therefore, the Allied boffins decided to begin work on the rice and treacle detector (RAT).

To disguise the use of the RAT in the desert war, the Allies started to call their soldiers The Desert Rats, thus hoping to fool the Axis intelligence to think that any mention of the RAT was in fact just a reference to ordinary Allied troops and therefore of no particular vital intelligence value.

Disguised as a German logistic corps rice and treacle delivery unit, a SAS squad managed to infiltrate General Kaput’s headquarters and lure Benjy away from the coding room using an imitation female weasel assembled by the boffins back in Britain.

Once Benjy was in their grasp the British undercover accountants created a diversion to cover their escape by deliberately misfiling several hundred German infantry invoices to keep the German soldiers busy and created a smokescreen to conceal their exfiltration from the German HQ by setting fire to a yet un-reconciled cashbook.

Once safely back behind British lines Benjy was handed over to military intelligence who rushed the code weasel back to the UK , never once accidentally leaving him on the train when they got off to change trains, which was another first for British military intelligence, a feat of diligence that was never once repeated in the post-war years.

Once Benjy was back at Bletchley Park and safely ensconced in the code shed it was only a matter of days before the Allies could decode all of the Germans most secret military intelligence traffic and so the war ended much, much sooner than would have otherwise been the case.