Churchill's Wizards (41 page)

Most of the listeners in the German Navy guessed that
Atlantiksender
was an enemy station, but they carried on listening despite that, because it was so good. When
Atlantiksender
cheerily reported the results of football matches between U-boat crews in St Nazaire, including the nicknames of goal-scorers with little personal details about them, or broadcast ‘special request' music to a specific U-boat that thought its position was completely secret, it made the German Navy feel under constant surveillance. ‘The British know everything anyway,' shrugged captured U-boat men, and no longer bothered to resist interrogation. The more the prisoners talked, the more information came back that the ‘black' propagandists could use. One of the interrogators on attachment to CSDIC was the veteran BBC broadcaster Charles Wheeler, then a young captain in the Royal Marines who spoke German because he had been born in Bremen. Wheeler was not after technical information. In friendly talks where the prisoners were offered cigarettes, he got stories about the bars and brothels of Brest, Lorient and St Nazaire that helped garnish the chatty broadcasts and to reinforce the German Navy's gnawing
angst
about ever-present spies, phone taps and radar.

The
Atlantiksender
programme of smoochy music, made more seductive by the breathily erotic voice of ‘Vicky', the announcer Agnes Bernelle, was interspersed with news bulletins and human interest stories. ‘Gallant doctors battle diphtheria in German children's camps' was the kind of apparently upbeat take on a disaster that was actually designed to worry a German parent. Delmer stressed that strict accuracy in professional naval and military matters would make listeners more likely to accept the invented or half-true stories about the economic, political or social situation at home in Germany. The credibility of the news was helped by close attention to BBC Monitoring's
Daily Digest
of German broadcasting, and also by Delmer's acquisition of a Hellschreiber teleprinter left behind by the correspondent of the official German news agency,
Deutsche
Nachrichtenbüro
, DNB, when he fled at the beginning of the war. It
was still receiving directly from Goebbels's centralised news system, so now the ‘black' team could swiftly broadcast his official Nazi news communiqués and speeches, either as impeccable cover or bent to their own disruptive purposes. (In July 1943, Delmer devised an ingenious plan, called
Helga
, to reverse the Hellschreiber process. Instead of receiving news from the centre, he wanted to feed false news, indistinguishable from the real thing, back into the German system while it was idling. Delmer's proposal for what we would now call ‘hacking into' the German news system and adding counterfeit stories to the brew was discussed at the very top, but never actually tried.)

When Air Ministry Intelligence became involved, Delmer got detailed reports of the RAF and USAAF bombing raids on Germany, including aerial photographs. Accurate damage reports from specific streets and neighbourhoods were mixed on air with heart-rending descriptions of women and children suffering the incendiaries and high explosive of Allied ‘Terror Raids', and horror stories about disease, mutilation, rats, necrophilia. Demoralising news from the civilian home front was followed up by seductive fantasies of a better life for German soldiers who surrendered or deserted. Stories from the International Committee of the Red Cross about escapees from Germany earning good money in Sweden, Switzerland or Spain featured regularly, as did rumours that deserters could get grants of land in Canada, the USA and Brazil. Reprisals from the German authorities were unlikely, the radio added, because they had no way of knowing whether missing people had deserted or simply died.

On 24 October 1943, a new ‘black' British radio station came through loud and clear on the same medium wavelengths as the authentic German Radio Deutschland, located in Munich.
Soldatensender
Calais
(Soldiers' Radio Calais, later called Soldiers' Radio West) followed the same tested formula of music and news. Although it was beamed at German troops occupying France, Belgium and Holland,
Soldatensender Calais
became a big hit with German civilians who liked its hard-hitting style and believed it was a genuine German station dedicated to the military, on the grounds that ‘our boys at the front' would have to be told harsher truths than the usual pap civilians were fed. Even Goebbels admitted that
Soldatensender
did a very clever job of propaganda.
Der Chef
was cut down in a fictional hail of bullets three weeks after the new station started broadcasting.

Soldatensender
went out so strongly on medium wave because Delmer had finally managed to get the underused Aspidistra transmitter back from the clutches of the BBC. Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, controller of the BBC European Service, could not stand up to the combined weight of the PWE, the Service Ministries and the chiefs of staff. Their case was unequivocal: ‘black' radio propaganda was needed to soften up the Atlantic Wall of Fortress Europe for the forthcoming invasion, the great storm of D-Day in June 1944 that would blast the way to Allied victory.

‘The Western Desert is a place fit only for war,' begins the script by the
Sunday Times
journalist James Lansdale Hodson for the 1943 propaganda documentary film
Desert Victory
:

In this testing environment, Major General Archibald Wavell, the soldier who lost an eye near Ypres and walked through the Jaffa Gate into Jerusalem with Lawrence in 1917, had been reviving Lawrence's guerrilla tactics, using cunning, deception, mobility and tiny ‘mosquito columns' against elephantine Italian forces. Wavell had been appointed British commander-in-chief of the Middle East Command a month before WW2 broke out. He was now in the same post once held by General Allenby, whose biography he was writing. Just like Allenby confronting the Ottoman Turks in WW1, he was facing a numerically superior enemy.

Wavell had a gift for picking good people. One was Major Ralph Bagnold, an officer in the Royal Signals, one of a select band who knew and respected the great desert that lay behind the cultivated coasts of North Africa. Bagnold had been exploring the Sahara since 1926. He had improved the sun compass for desert navigation, discovered the best way of driving up dunes (full-speed, head-on), invented rope ladders and steel channels for getting unstuck in soft going, and even written a treatise on ‘The Physics of Blown Sand' which got him elected to the Royal Society. Bagnold foresaw that the
Italians might send reconnaissance and raiding parties out of the enormous Libyan desert to sever British military communications between Cairo and Khartoum and, when Fascist Italy finally declared war on the Allies in June 1940, got
carte blanche
from Wavell to set up, equip, supply and prepare a new Long Range Desert Group (LRDG).

Bagnold located old companions from pre-war desert explorations, plucking Pat Clayton from Tanganyika and Bill Kennedy Shaw from Palestine, and put them in charge of young men from the backcountry of New Zealand who had lost all their guns and kit in a torpedo attack at sea. Their commander, Major General Bernard Freyberg, VC (the man who swam ashore before the Gallipoli landings), was reluctant to let them go, but the New Zealanders – as always the best troops in the Dominions – took to the desert as though born to it. They became mainstays of the LRDG, doing what Wavell called ‘inconspicuous but invaluable service'.

From the beginning, Wavell had been creating the illusion for the Italians that he was stronger and better equipped than he actually was. In June 1940, the
Daily Mail
correspondent Alexander Clifford was able to deduce the ‘routine of bluff' by British forces on the Libyan–Egyptian frontier, 300 miles west of Cairo, and made one of the earliest references to the use of dummy tanks:

The dummy tanks were the responsibility of the fake 10th Battalion Royal Tank Regiment (10 RTR) under a Major Johnston. The unit, actually formed from men of the 1st Battalion Durham Light Infantry, deployed and operated primitive dummy tanks and lorries made out of wood and canvas which they carried folded in the unit transport.

In late October 1940, Wavell was in Khartoum with Sir Anthony Eden, the British Secretary of State for War, and other generals, coordinating his attack on the Italian Empire in East Africa,
Africa
Orientale
Italiana
. The British were keeping close tabs on the Italian forces in Libya by deciphering their Air Force communications, reading captured documents and mail, questioning prisoners of war, doing photographic air reconnaissance and above all sending armoured Rolls-Royce patrols to probe the gaps between the scattered outposts and minefields that made up the Italian front line. From November 1940, Wavell initiated a deception operation encouraging the Italians to think that he was really preparing an Expeditionary Force to Greece rather than an attack on them; Wavell's Middle East Intelligence Centre set in motion a paper trail to this effect, spreading rumours and planting false information on a Japanese source in Egypt. (Japan had joined the Axis with Germany and Italy in late 1937.) Compared to later deception operations it was fairly basic, but it prepared the ground. Wavell had further deception operations in mind, but he needed a really good man to oversee them. It was now that he summoned Dudley Clarke to Cairo.

On 18 December 1940, Tony Simonds of British military intelligence was instructed to go in plain clothes to meet an old friend off a civil aeroplane landing just before midday at Cairo airport, and to greet him without surprise. This became a challenge when Clarke arrived looking like a golfer from Chicago, wearing loud black and white plus-fours, a check cap and dark glasses, claiming to be an American journalist called Wrangel. This seems more like showing off than disguise, a trait which would later get Clarke into trouble. He had been travelling for ten days, his journey from England to Egypt made complex by the need to avoid enemy territory.

At 9 a.m. on 9 December 1940, just as Clarke was leaving Lisbon for West Africa, the seven or eight British war correspondents in Cairo were summoned to General Wavell's office at the end of an upstairs corridor at ‘Grey Pillars' which housed GHQ Middle East in Garden City. As ever, the commander-in-chief's desk in front of the ten-foothigh map on the wall was bare of papers. ‘The Chief' was smiling slightly that morning. He announced ‘an important raid', code-named compass, by the British, Indian and Anzac soldiers of General Richard O'Connor's Western Desert Force on the Italian Tenth Army. Taciturn Wavell, described by Alan Moorehead of the
Daily Express
as ‘an island in a sea of garrulousness', asked the journalists if they had known an operation was imminent; none had heard a thing.

The little band of reporters, honorary officers dressed in khaki with a shoulder flash that read ‘British War Correspondent' in gold letters on green, scrambled to get to the front a day and a half away to the west. No travel arrangements had been made by the Public Relations Unit, so when their cars broke down, they hitch-hiked; they ate what they scrounged and slept when they could. It took them days to catch up to the front because the British Empire troops were going too fast for them, with the infantry division acting as the assault force and the tanks of the armoured division slipping round behind, a method that Richard Dimbleby of the BBC likened to hauling a man up with one hand and punching him in the jaw with the other, again and again. On 16 December they took Sollum and Helfaya Pass and the Libyan escarpment, where British troops could put aside briny tea, biscuit and bully beef to gorge on luxurious Italian rations – ham, cheese, bread, fresh fruit and vegetables, washed down with wine and sweet bottled water. They were amazed to find that every Italian soldier was issued with his own little
espresso
coffee pot. Their 38,000 prisoners included five Italian generals.

When Dudley Clarke presented himself, in uniform, to his old chief on the morning of Thursday, 19 December 1940, Graziani's army was being bundled out of Egypt, and for the first time in more than a year of war the British were not retreating, as they had from France, Norway and Somaliland, but driving forward. Clarke's life as a ‘freelance' roving staff officer was ended, as Wavell gave him the secret and ‘most gratifying' eighth assignment that would last the next five years. Clarke camouflages his role as just ‘being a working part in the smooth-running engine of a General Headquarters at war', because he was obviously not allowed to talk about it. In fact Wavell put Clarke in charge of all bluffs, cover plans and deceptions for his military operations. He remained chief deceiver for all the Mediterranean commanders – Wavell, Auchinleck, Alexander, Wilson – throughout the North African advances and retreats of 1941–2, and did the same job at Eisenhower's Allied Force Headquarters in Algiers from 1943 onwards, ending his war service in northern Italy. Clarke's ideas about strategic and tactical deception would help drive the Axis out of Africa and aid the seaborne landings that led the Allies back into southern and then north-western Europe. Few men of his rank wielded such influence behind the scenes in Cairo, Algiers, London, Washington DC
and New Delhi, and when WW2 ended in 1945, Field Marshal Harold Alexander reckoned that Dudley Clarke had done as much as any single officer to win it.

Wavell and Clarke stood before the map on the wall in Cairo. Wavell's 4th Indian Infantry Division had just retaken Sidi Barrani in Egypt. Wavell now planned to pull them back southward and ship them, together with the 5th Indian Division, to Gedaref and Port Sudan for an attack on Italian East Africa. Wavell's other plans included the use of Orde Wingate to lead the Ethiopian Patriot guerrillas of Gideon Force back into Ethiopia from exile in the Sudan.

Wavell's forces were outnumbered by the Italians on paper, but he knew attack was the best form of defence. Clarke's new mission was continually and systematically hoodwinking the enemy about British aims, intentions and capabilities. As ‘Personal Intelligence Officer (Special Duties) to the Commander-in-Chief' he reported directly to Wavell and got clerical help from his private secretary, but he had no staff and no ‘establishment'. The work was ‘Most Secret', so his official cover story and additional duty from 5 January 1941 was a role in MI9, Escape and Evasion by Allied servicemen. He was taken to his office: the door opened on a very small converted bathroom.
Action This Day
.

Wavell's attack on
Africa
Orientale
Italiana
was now the occasion of Clarke's very first deception operation, code-named
CAMILLA
, focused on British Somaliland. This British protectorate at the top of the Horn of Africa had been evacuated in August by the small British Empire garrison in the face of overwhelming Italian forces. Though British Somaliland was strategically unimportant, Wavell wanted the Italians to believe that Allied troops from Egypt were going to retake it. The Indian Divisions were indeed moving south, but their target was Eritrea on the Red Sea.

Clarke sat down and worked out the staff-work, logistics and communications if British forces really were going to try and take back British Somaliland. Then he constructed a model of the operation for the benefit of enemy intelligence. This elaborate deception involved bogus administration in offices at Aden (which he knew well from his time there in 1935), air and sea raids across the Gulf of Aden apparently designed to ‘soften up' Italian naval and military targets
around Berbera, the issuing of campaign maps and pamphlets on British Somaliland's climate, culture, clans and customs, sibs spread in civilian Egypt and among the armed forces, more false information planted on the Japanese consul at Port Said and ‘indiscreet' fake telegrams and wireless telegraphy traffic. Beginning on 19 December, the plan was intended to peak in early January 1941.

In one sense it succeeded brilliantly. The Italian commander swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker, and started evacuating British Somaliland. Unfortunately this was the exact opposite of what the strategic deception plan intended him to do. He was meant to reinforce his east: instead he moved more troops north to Eritrea, which was of course precisely where the real British attack was targeted. Clarke learned his first lesson the hard way: the point of deception was not getting the enemy to
think
the way you would like, but getting them to
do
what you wanted.

Other parts of Clarke's deception worked much better. He used bogus wireless traffic to make the Italians think there were two Australian divisions in Kenya. This successfully held Italian troops in the wrong place while three coordinated attacks by the multi-racial armies of the British Empire began liberating Ethiopia from five years of Fascist occupation. Emperor Haile Selassie returned to his people in Addis Ababa on 5 May 1941.

Another of Clarke's ideas bore long-term fruit. On 14 January 1941, he met Colonel William J. ‘Wild Bill' Donovan, President Roosevelt's personal military emissary, future founder of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency), on his six-week strategic tour of the Mediterranean. Clarke told him about the commandos, and wrote a seminal paper for Donovan suggesting the formation of an American commando force. Clarke's love of film served him well. Having recently seen the western,
North-
West Passage
, in which Spencer Tracy led a force of buckskinned frontier fighters called ‘Rogers' Rangers', he suggested ‘Rangers' as an appropriate name for the American commandos. The US Rangers were duly founded in May 1942.

Years later, in 1953, when Clarke wrote a proposal for the sequel to
Seven Assignments
, a book which he wanted to call
The Secret War
, he described his wartime deception work as ‘a war of wits – of fantasy and imagination – fought out on an almost private basis between the
supreme heads of Hitler's Intelligence (and Mussolini's) and a small band of men and women – British, American and French – operating from the opposite shores of the Mediterranean Sea'. In the event, he was never granted official permission to write that book, but it is clear that Dudley Clarke's deception was aimed high, at the minds of the few, in contrast to Delmer's psychological warfare, which was directed lower, at the guts of the many.