Churchill's Wizards (43 page)

Stirling said that when he ‘settled for L Detachment SAS … Dudley Clark [e] was delighted to have some flesh and blood parachutists instead of totally bogus ones'. This completed a unique hat-trick. Dudley Clarke helped to found and name three famous striking forces, the British Commandos, the US Rangers, and the SAS.

The principle behind what Dudley Clarke had done with the original, fictional, SAS was also very important in itself. Perhaps the essence of military intelligence is working out the opposition's ‘order of battle' and then analysing it. This is the military version of taxonomy, assembling all known information into a coherent and ordered picture. All the pieces – spies' gossip, radio intercepts, newspaper stories, stolen or seized documents, front-line reports, aerial reconnaissance, the badges of captured personnel, phrases from PoW interrogations, vehicle identification marks, camp signposts, guidons, etc. – are part of the huge puzzle being put together so that ‘I' or Intelligence can tell ‘Ops' or Operations exactly which enemy units are where and what they are up to. Dudley Clarke knew how meticulous and orderly enemy staff were: he had that kind of mind himself and understood the satisfactions of things clicking into place. And so he fed the enemy's hunger for precise information with perhaps his greatest creation, the ‘notional' or bogus order of battle.

Inventing phantom forces was a long game that required a good memory, an efficient filing system, military realism and consistency over months and years. Between 1941 and 1945, Clarke invented seven more ‘notional' brigades, thirty-two ‘notional' divisions, ten corps and three entire armies. The Special Air Service Brigade was a small jewel in what became a large crown. But that initial imaginary force remained a particular success. First, Stirling turned Clarke's dream into a famously effective reality, raiding behind enemy lines. Second, the discovery of the SAS's actual existence in the field confirmed what German and Italian intelligence believed they already
knew, and the small pleasure of that confirmation helped blind them to the fact that for much of the time they were being sold dummies.

It was in early 1942 that Clarke started drawing together all his fictitious units into a comprehensive deception plan called
CASCADE
. A loose-leaf ‘Book of Reference' was drawn up which had all real and ‘notional' units in it and was circulated to everyone who needed to know so there was no contradiction. Everything bogus had to have a history, a purpose, and physical evidence like identifiable signs which could appear on other (real) units' vehicles for spies to spot. There had to be wireless traffic where necessary, and paperwork. Getting false information on to genuine documents was an administrative headache because once started it could never be neglected. But the grinding details paid off handsomely in the big picture. Clarke's false or ‘notional' order of battle, which made the enemy massively overestimate and miscalculate opposition and thus spread their own forces against all possible threats, is completely in the spirit of Sun Tzu's
Art of War
:

By the end of WW2 Clarke and his imaginative disciples had conjured up phantom forces not just for the British but also for their Allies. One of the most important, the ‘First United States Army Group' or
FUSAG
, played a decisive role around D-Day in 1944.

Back in February 1941, when he still had no staff or office and was ill with jaundice, Clarke already had a useful friend, colleague and daily visitor to his hospital bed in Brigadier Raymund Maunsell, the head of Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME), Cairo's equivalent of MI5. This friendship became an enduring asset for ‘A' Force. No one had a wider range of contacts than SIME for spreading sibs and planting information useful for strategic deception. Police and security people have their own mafia of professional association and Maunsell, always called by his initials, ‘RJ', was in touch with Egyptian, Indian, Persian and Turkish officials, as well as British colonial counter-espionage in Aden, Sudan and Palestine. He watched the Spanish, Rumanian,
Bulgarian and Japanese consulates closely, employed both Sephardi Jewish and Muslim Brotherhood agents in Cairo, and bribed Egyptian policemen and concierges for useful information. Through the Field Security branch of the Military Police (later part of the Intelligence Corps), Maunsell also had access to captured Axis spies who could spread disinformation.

One of the first of these ‘double agents' was a Bedouin called Ahmed Sayef, arrested on the Libyan–Egyptian frontier by Lieutenant A. W. Sansom, a fleshy little man, born in Cairo to a British father himself born in Baghdad, who was familiar with the Egyptian
demimonde
and fluent in Arabic, French, Greek and Italian. The man he had captured, Sayef, was working for Sheikh Mustapha ben Haroun, who managed the Arabic-speaking spies for Italian intelligence.

Sansom informed Maunsell of Sayef's existence, and duly let the Bedouin know that he would get double pay if he took back certain information to the Italians. But quite soon Sayef started coming back over the frontier from Italian-held Libya with what was found to be false information. Clearly, the Italians had discovered he was a double agent and were playing the British at their own game. But Maunsell of Intelligence told Sansom of Field Security not to say anything to Sayef because even false information was valuable, once it was known to be false. Finding what the enemy wants you to think may be as useful as truffling up something he does not want you to know. Sansom thought that the British were winning as long as (a) the enemy did not know our information was false, or (b) did not know
we
knew that
theirs
was.

Sansom was appointed chief Field Security officer for the Cairo area and recruited informers from all sorts of communities: Palestinian Jews, Greek Cypriots, Lebanese Christians, Sudanese and so on. He also kept an eye on Axis civilians and Arab nationalists and looked out for spies and security leaks among the usual big city lowlife of crooks, deserters, extortionists, fences, gunrunners and hashish-dealers. Sansom's man at the central telephone exchange tipped him off about any interesting phone calls. ‘Mac' (or Mahmoud), the barman at the Kit Kat cabaret, was on the payroll, whereas Joe the Swiss in the Long Bar at Shepheard's was believed (but never quite proved) to work for the enemy.

Madames of brothels told Sansom bedroom secrets; the infidelities of the officer class entered his security fiefdom, but Sansom was never
a man to confuse morals with morale. He understood that plenty of available and reasonable prostitutes kept the warriors happy, whatever puritan authorities thought. ‘Cairo at this time was one big knocking shop,' he wrote in his entertaining memoir
I Spied Spies
. Many houses and blocks of flats had been converted into furnished accommodation that could be rented by the month, week, day, night or even hour. Privacy was guaranteed and Sansom himself maintained three such flats around the city for meeting informants and changing disguises. Dudley Clarke later used two on the floor below a brothel at 6, Kasr-el-Nil, for his new offices in April 1941. They were a perfect cover: no one paid much attention to the comings and goings of different officers.

On 10 March 1941, the first twelve camouflage captains, trained by Colonel Buckley in England, arrived in Cairo after a two-month voyage round the Cape of Good Hope. They included John Codner, Edwin Galligan, Robert Medley, Peter Proud, Steven Sykes and Jasper Maskelyne. They were all flat broke. Typically, the one who made the telephone call to Barkas asking for money was Maskelyne, the charming but feckless stage magician. Maskelyne's theatrical charisma has cadged him more credit than perhaps he deserves among the
camoufleurs
. Julian Trevelyan, who knew Maskelyne, wrote more matter-of-factly that he was ‘at once innocent and urbane, and … ended up as an Entertainments officer in the Middle East'.

And yet illusionists and stage magicians do catch people's imaginations. This is one reason why Dudley Clarke employed Maskelyne in ‘A' Force. His entertainments were lectures on escape and evasion given to over 200,000 aircrew across the Middle East, and he also helped MI9 in inventing parachute packaging and small devices and tools that prisoners could hide. Maskelyne's presence embodied the power of deception for older heads among the military who remembered his grandfather Maskelyne's Hall of Magic in Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. Even the dimmest staff officer understood that conjurors made things appear and disappear, so the spell of Maskelyne sprinkled a bit of stardust over the dull business of camouflage, and strengthened Clarke's hand at GHQ.

After Wavell, at Churchill's instructions, had pulled back and disbanded General O'Connor's Western Desert Force in order to send 50,000
troops and 8,000 vehicles to Greece and Crete, Rommel launched a
blitzkrieg
attack on the skeleton force left behind in Cyrenaica Command, Eastern Libya. Wavell did not expect this. He missed the warning signs from
ULTRA
because he did not think Rommel was ready. Wavell simply had too much on his plate: there was fighting in the Balkans to the north and East Africa to the south, and when Rommel attacked from the west, there was also trouble to Wavell's east.

Exactly coinciding with Rommel's advance, a
coup
d'état
in Iraq by the Arab nationalist Rashid Ali el-Gailani and a group of colonels threatened the militarily vital oil pipeline to British Palestine. The trouble in Iraq was partly an extension of the Arab rebellion that Clarke had helped to suppress in Palestine in 1936, after which the Grand Mufti and the top guerrilla leader had moved on to Baghdad to foment trouble. El-Gailani's coup succeeded in toppling the pro-British monarchy, but the importance of Iraqi oil to the British meant that it could not be allowed to last long. For Wavell, it was just one more headache at a time when the Germans under Rommel were enjoying great successes.

Through April 1941, the German Panzers swept the British back to the Egyptian frontier, wiping out all the gains of
COMPASS
and capturing British Generals Gambier-Parry, Neame and O'Connor into the bargain. Only the port of Tobruk in all Libya held out against regular German assault by land and continuous dive-bombing from nearby El Adem airfield. Peter Proud, one of the
camoufleurs
who came out with Maskelyne, found himself trapped inside besieged Tobruk with a lot of Australian infantry and British gunners. Like Geoffrey Barkas, Proud had worked in films, and now put his skills as an art director to good use, improvising camouflage and screening on poles to help defend Tobruk, using scrounged fabric. Real artillery was hidden; meanwhile dummy weapons, lorries and tanks made of scrap formed decoy targets to draw enemy fire. Irregular patches sewn on draped nets effectively imitated broken ground. Nothing was quite what it seemed in the dusty white broken town. Around the thirty-five-mile perimeter mines lay buried, unsleeping camouflaged sentries. Troops with their footfalls muffled by crepe-rubber soles patrolled aggressively right into the German lines. There was much driving of vehicles to make dust for disguise and diversion. The garrison destroyed or altered landmarks to deflect German artillery range-finding, and mixed real
Observation Posts with dummy OPs up poles. When some army vehicles had to be repainted to appear different and thus more numerous, Proud created a starchy coating from condemned foodstuffs mixed with seawater. Life during the 246-day siege was half-troglodytic, half-holiday. Men slept in caves underneath rubble, breathing air through transplanted ship's ventilators, but by day they leapt up from swimming and sunbathing in shorts and boots to man Bofors, Bren, or Lewis guns during frequent air raids. A daily newspaper, The Tobruk Truth, was compiled, cyclostyled and circulated.

The harbour was the back door for supply and relief. The entire garrison of Tobruk was changed in the eight-month siege. 27,000 men were shipped out and 29,000 shipped in, including Indians, Poles and South Africans. Much of the movement happened at night, and Peter Proud helped hide the navy lighters and gunboats by day, concealing them among the wrecked shipping in the harbour or in especially netted-over coves. The last three Hurricane fighters were skilfully hidden underground while decoy hangars and model aircraft drew away German bombing and strafing. Camouflage also protected the vital water-distilling plant. The distillery was far too prominent to conceal but it could be made to look wrecked. After a stick of Axis bombs struck nearby, a British camouflage party rushed out to dig bigger bomb holes and to scatter debris prepared beforehand, a cement and paint team created a black, ragged ‘hole' in the roof and side of the building, and the demolition team blew up an unused cooling tower. It made a pretty picture for the high-altitude Italian reconnaissance plane, and Rome claimed a direct hit on Tobruk's distillery – which in fact continued to produce its peculiar but potable water.

The next British push-back was operation crusader, in which Clarke's ‘A' force also played a role. The
camoufleur
Steven Sykes was sent into the Western desert in 1941 to make nine miles of dummy railhead which ran west of Misheifa to a fake ‘Depot no 2', complete with ramps and sidings. The idea was to draw enemy bombing away from the real railway that
CRUSADER
would use, which ran to Depot no. 1, and also to convince the enemy that the British still had not completed their preparations to attack.

They started laying real rails but used only a few sleepers. Eventually they ran out of rails and used tracks made of flattened petrol tins, bashed into shape and blackened. The eighteen flat cars
and thirty-three box wagons were constructed from local hurdles of split palm-branch known as
gerida
, covered with canvas. Sykes was rather proud of his locomotive which made real smoke from an old army cookhouse Soyer stove inside. When materials ran short they had to scale everything down to two-thirds size. Sykes also used objects known as ‘net gun pits' that Peter Proud had invented, which could be carried six to a truck. They were made of canvas and covered with camouflage netting, and when raised on poles, each net gun pit looked just like an artillery gun dug into a pit. ‘Depot no. 2' was bombed by the enemy, the ultimate badge of honour to a
camoufleur
. (Barkas claimed that 100 bombs fell on the dummies but Sykes modestly said this was ‘perhaps more than I would have claimed myself'.) Sykes spent a lot of time driving through the desert too, picking up abandoned ‘Sunshields', canvas and wood folding covers that clipped over a tank and made it look like an innocuous 3-ton lorry. The Sunshield could easily be cast aside when going into action. These special hoods were designed to Wavell's specification, and built by Victor Jones of ‘A' Force.