Churchill's Wizards (20 page)

George Orwell said that for the ‘enlightened' of his generation, ‘1914–18 was written off as a meaningless slaughter', and some writers like Wilfred Owen tend to pity the soldiers of WW1 as passive victims, ‘those who die as cattle'. Shaw, however, saw it as his patriotic duty to report more encouraging news in ‘Joy-Riding at The Front'. For all his clear sight, he was not above putting a favourable gloss on things: ‘Men torn from civil life of the most prosperous and comfortable kind, and engaged in the most perilous service … say without affectation that they have never been so happy…'

‘The Duty of Lying', an interesting chapter in C. E. Montague's
Disenchantment
, begins:

Montague saw the press as a perfect weapon for deception. Enemy intelligence read everything in the newspapers:

Here is a game, Montague suggests, to exercise the rat-like cunning of the intelligence officer: sniffing out real crumbs of information from poisoned bait.

Montague, in peacetime a
Guardian
journalist, would have known many of the secrets of the Western Front. He suggests that the use of ‘camouflage stories' in the press was never fully exploited by either side, but what little he reveals of the practice is intriguing. A popular science journal he does not name, late in the war, gave ‘a recklessly full description' of the ‘listening sets' used by the British to eavesdrop on German telephone calls in the field. This article was actually ‘a camouflage', planted by GHQ as ‘the last thrust in a long duel'.

The Germans had been listening to British field telephone conversations from the very beginning of trench warfare. In early February 1915, the day after the Life Guards had replaced a French regiment near Ypres, secretly, at night, with all their identifying badges removed, Captain Stewart Menzies, future head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), was astonished to get a message in a bottle lobbed over the wire from an Alsace regiment in the German trenches opposite welcoming ‘the English cavalry' to their section of the line.

Observation Posts were linked by telephone lines to gun batteries further back, but these forward lines were often leaky. The British did not realise until July 1916 how good the Germans were at intercepting traffic on British field telephones.
Fernsprech Truppen
(‘Telephone Troops') tapped Allied calls either by directly attaching a cable to the line, or by earth induction from any lines that were not wholly metallic, picking up the electrical signals as they went through the ground (this could be done from up to 3.3 km away), then amplifying and monitoring them on Moritz listening sets. Thus careless British talk cost more lives than sinister ‘foreign spies'. Idle trench chatter helped German intelligence to build up the complete British order of battle, and often let them know when and where attacks were coming so they could prepare their machine guns and artillery. Montague points out that the British did not grasp the extent of what was going on until the Battle of the Somme:

In truth, pettifogging British staff bureaucracy meant that nearly two years were wasted shuffling files between different (and jealous) departments before the signals problem could finally be brought under control. It was only late in the war that the British started using other media to mislead the Germans. Hence an apparently indiscreet article in a rather out-of-the-way wireless journal in which, according to Montague, ‘the reach of our electric ears was, to say the least of it, not understated. Few people in England might notice the article. The enemy could be trusted to do so.'

Montague also writes about the deception plan that accompanied the expanded British Fifth Army's attack on Pilckem Ridge, north-east of Ypres, on 31 July 1917, which turned into the notorious Battle of Passchendaele by the time it petered out exhausted in November. Under the overall command of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the initial push tried to employ the sort of deceptions successfully used by Plumer's Second Army, taking Messines in June, and by the Canadians, capturing Vimy Ridge in April. Canadian soldiers had surprised the Germans by a brilliant
coup de théâtre
, emerging in the middle of no-man's-land from tunnels dug through the chalk. They had also disassembled, transported and reassembled a church steeple so the Germans wasted shells bombarding the wrong place. As had happened before the Messines assault, replicas of the ground and models of the defences were now used for training near Ypres while the big guns were got into place. The British did an elaborate feint, a ‘Chinese attack', much further south at Lens, to make the Germans think the push was coming there rather than further north:

Then an apparently indiscreet general in ‘one small edition of one London paper' blabbed that the British push was aimed at Lens and a supposedly outraged MP asked a question in the House of Commons about greater control of the press. Montague believed that deception worked: ‘The Germans kept their guns in force at Lens, and their counter barrage east of Ypres was so much the lighter, and our losses so much the less.' But Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson in their authoritative study of the battle,
Passchendaele: the Untold Story
, disagree. Their assessment is brutal: ‘Haig's deception plan, in sum, seemed to have the capacity only to deceive Sir Douglas himself.'

Other kinds of tricks were going on behind British lines. The enemy dead yielded much useful information: their diaries, documents, maps, letters, pay books, photographs, postcards, identity discs and shoulder straps, even the markings on their weapons and kit, could all help intelligence fill out the ‘order of battle', the identifying of enemy units and formations. But you could learn even more from living prisoners of war. Hundreds of thousands of Germans were captured in the Great War, and many gave away much more vital knowledge than their name, rank and number. This was not always achieved through formal interrogation. The sympathetic approach often worked well: a chair, a cigarette and a friendly chat with someone who took no notes seemed harmless enough. The boastful could be drawn out with appreciation, the quiet ones coaxed to unburden themselves. Away from the interrogation rooms, the holding cages and cells were also wired for sound with concealed microphones and fluent German-speakers eavesdropping via listening-sets. And there were stool pigeons:

These stories come from
The Secret Corps: A Tale of ‘Intelligence'
On All Fronts
, written by Captain Ferdinand Tuohy, former head of the GHQ wireless service. In chapter 6, ‘The Brain War', Tuohy berated the infuriating slowness of the intelligence system in grasping the importance of deception:

Tuohy thinks this initial slowness was because the British General Staff gave up all ideas of tactical surprise after the failed attack of Neuve Chapelle in spring 1915. He says plans for deception operations were still being rejected in 1916. But by the middle of 1918, deception was standard practice at GHQ in France.

Memoranda from Lieutenant General Herbert Lawrence, Chief of the General Staff, sent out in August and September 1918 show that deception could only begin to succeed against the enemy when the British got a complete grip on their wireless security (by, for example, changing call signs daily) and began sending the fake chatter and
‘dummy traffic' that they wanted the Germans to hear; when they started going through all the motions of physical camouflage in unnecessary places; and when they supplied false information to their own troops as well as the enemy, so anyone captured would, quite sincerely, reveal consistent chaff.

The most advanced example of this kind of thinking comes from the final three weeks of WW1, in a memorandum on ‘Security' by Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen for Brigadier General, General Staff, GHQ, Intelligence, dated 23 October 1918. The usual counter-espionage sense of ‘security' is preventing the enemy finding out about you. This entails keeping documents safe, stopping leakages from wireless and telephone, and instructing all ranks how to behave when captured (i. e., after giving the required name, rank and number, repeating ‘I cannot say' to questions.) It also entails warning your own men about some of the devious methods employed by the enemy to extract information.

Meinertzhagen, however, had his own novel definition of security. He thought the aim of security went well beyond ‘preventing the enemy divining our real plan', and was actually ‘feeding him with sufficient material to induce him to believe he is in possession of our real plan'. In his parlance, ‘security' means ‘deception', as in ‘Security feeds the enemy with material served up in as acceptable form as possible.' And when he writes that ‘badly prepared camouflage will have the same effect on a trained Intelligence Officer [at enemy HQ] as badly served food – it will be refused or if accepted will not be digested', the word ‘camouflage' now means ‘disinformation'.

He saw the kind of physical camouflage done by Royal Engineers at Special Works Parks as ‘negative camouflage, i. e., camouflage designed to conceal information, inanimate objects or troops from the enemy'. In the Meinertzhagen view ‘positive camouflage' is whatever is ‘designed to carry false information to the enemy', as well as ‘to our own troops and indeed to the world in general'. Meinertzhagen thought it essential that ‘positive camouflage' – deception – ‘be controlled by the one brain' at GHQ and then filtered down through Armies, Corps, Divisions, Brigades etc. He summarised the various forms of ‘positive camouflage' under the following headings: