Churchill's Wizards (44 page)

Clarke's men were by now doing effective work on many fronts. In the summer of 1941, dummy tanks deployed by Captain Ogilvie-Grant of ‘A' Force were a crucial part of the defence of Cyprus. The island was never invaded by the Germans or Italians because it was believed to be strongly reinforced. Before the real 50th Division arrived, the entirely notional 7th Division appeared to have three infantry brigades plus divisional troops, four squadrons of tanks, a ‘Special Services' battalion and lots of anti-aircraft guns. There were, in fact, just a few real men who kept busy creating and re-creating a mirage.

Meanwhile, Clarke himself had set off for neutral Turkey on 26 April 1941, carrying a personal letter from Wavell to Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the ill-fated British Ambassador to Turkey. (Only a few months later, Knatchbull-Hugesson's Albanian butler, code-named
CICERO
by the Germans, started regularly photographing the confidential documents in the diplomat's safe.) Churchill was anxious to get Turkey on the Allied side and sent his Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to offer ‘stimulus and guidance', but the Turks resolutely refused to enter the war until February 1945, when they were sure Nazi Germany was on its last legs.

Clarke's real mission was in Istanbul. He discreetly met up with the British assistant naval attaché, Commander Vladimir Wolfson, RNVR, one of the excellent people picked by Admiral John Godfrey, the director of Naval Intelligence. Working together over the next three weeks, Wolfson and Clarke began what Clarke called a ‘long and profitable partnership' that lasted until the end of the war. They began by planting stories about the British SAS and the Free French attacking Rommel from behind, and set up ten new channels for getting deceptive material to German agents, to be triggered by code messages from Clarke to Wolfson sent via the British embassy. These channels included Greeks, Hungarians, Iraqis, Russians, Swedes and Turks who worked in banking, carpetselling, diplomacy, journalism and stenography. The two men also organised a skeleton MI9 system for the area to help Allied servicemen escape from Greece, Bulgaria and Rumania and travel via Turkey back to the Middle East.

Clarke travelled by express train through the night of 17 May south-east from Ankara towards Adana and the Syrian frontier with Turkey. It was a delicate moment of history. Two days earlier, German aeroplanes had begun landing in Syria on their way to support Rashid Ali's anti-British rebellion in Iraq. Wavell had confided to Clarke before he left that he would attack Vichy Syria in just that contingency, and the RAF had promptly bombed Syrian aerodromes at Aleppo, Damascus, Rayak and Palmyra. Oil pipelines that supplied northern Iraq's 2.5 million tons of oil every year from Mosul and Kirkuk ran to Haditha on the Euphrates and then split in two. The northern section led to the port of Tripoli in Lebanon, then part of Vichy Syria, and the southern ran through Transjordan to the port of Haifa in British Palestine. The British had initially closed down the flow to Syria, but in April 1941 Iraqi troops supporting Rashid Ali seized the Anglo-Iraqi Petroleum Company oil fields, re-opened the flow to Vichy Syria and shut down the pipeline to British Palestine. The new commander-in-chief of India, General Claude Auchinleck, diverted to Basra a brigade of Indian troops, Sikhs and Gurkhas, who had been destined for Malaya, and Wavell sent an expeditionary force of 6,000 men across the desert from Palestine in May. The short, sharp Allied campaign was all over by early June. The coup was crushed, and Rashid Ali, the Mufti and the Arab Nationalist guerrillas were sent packing over the border into Iran.

Against this background Clarke evaded the British consular officials at Adana on the Turkish border who were trying to prevent British citizens from entering Vichy Syria. He reached Tripoli on 18 May then drove to Beirut to get the latest information on the military situation for Wavell; the day after that he was in a car with a Jewish refugee family travelling south down the coast road from Beirut to Palestine. Between Sidon and Tyre, Clarke managed to stop the car by what he called ‘a lucky stratagem' at ‘the key point of the Litani river crossing'. He covertly surveyed the area that the British 7th Division would have to take when invading Lebanon from Palestine. The road followed the flat ground at the edge of the foothills about 1,000 yards from the sea, and crossed the river over the stone arches of the vital Quâsmiyeh bridge. The Litani river was about 40 yards wide and flowed between steep banks lined with poplars. North of the river was a 500-foot hill from which a Vichy redoubt bristling with guns overlooked the bridge amid orchards and cornfields. Clarke saw the fort would have to be dealt with before any invasion could be successful.

Three weeks later, nearly 400 men of No. 11 (Scottish) Commando landed from the sea to attack the redoubt and seize the bridge. The Vichy French, however, promptly blew up the bridge and, because many of the commandos were put ashore by the Royal Navy on the wrong side of the river, they suffered fifty wounded and fifty-four killed, including their colonel, before they secured the crossing.

By 21 May Clarke was back in Cairo, briefing Wavell on all he had done and seen, and preparing a high-level deception to assist the invasion of Vichy Syria, scheduled for 7 June. Clarke intended to spread the story that this attack had been called off because of a flaming row between the Allies. (‘There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies,' Churchill had remarked in 1940, ‘and that is fighting without them.') The story was that GHQ Middle East had quarrelled with Free French HQ, who had failed to persuade Wavell of the need to invade Vichy Syria. Harsh words had apparently been spoken. General de Gaulle was said to have flown up to Cairo to mediate, been rebuffed, and promptly packed his bags and left. On 4 June, Dudley Clarke got an Arab agent across the frontier into Syria with the news that General de Gaulle had flown off to Khartoum in a dudgeon. It is not clear if the story worked, but the campaign was a success. By Bastille Day 1941, Vichy Syria had fallen to the Allies.

By then, Wavell himself had been sacked by Churchill. After fighting valiantly on five fronts, Wavell was replaced on 21 June, the day that Germany invaded Russia. The Prime Minister who had goaded and harassed him from afar now swapped Wavell with Auchinleck from India. Auchinleck, known as ‘the Auk', kept the same team going at GHQ Cairo, and Dudley Clarke still ran ‘A' Force.

‘The real home of successful deception was the Middle East,' conceded J. C. Masterman in his book,
The Double-cross System of WW2
. However,
The Official History of the Security Service 1908–1945
, completed by John Curry in 1946, points out that Security Intelligence Middle East was pretty much on its own, cut off from MI5. As Curry puts it: ‘While the Security organisations in the Middle East had expanded enormously they had to a great extent lost touch with developments in London and during 1940 and 1941 … received little benefit from London's experience and knowledge of the Abwehr and its ramifications.' Raymond Maunsell of SIME used a ‘turned' German agent called Durrent in spring 1940, very soon after MI5 in London began the practice, but the effective use of double agents thereafter seems to have evolved independently in the Middle East. The first proper ‘play back' or double agent that Dudley Clarke used in Cairo was Renato Levi, a handsome Italian Jew in his mid-thirties. He had been a reliable source of information for the SIS in France before being recruited by Mussolini's military intelligence service,
Servizio
di
Informazione
Militare
(SIM). Levi stayed in touch with British SIS while persuading the Italians that he could set up an espionage network for them in Cairo, where he arrived early in 1941. His first British contact in Cairo was Kenyon Jones, a burly ex-Rugby Blue from SIME hired by Maunsell because he spoke German.

Levi had picked up reasonable English in Australia. He was an easygoing man who lived on his wits and had an eye for the girls and the good life. Levi cheerily assured Kenyon Jones that he was going to be sent a wireless transmitter set via the diplomatic bag of a neutral embassy in the Balkans. Meanwhile he asked for a place to stay and an innocuous job. While they waited for the radio, which never came, Renato chased women. Kenyon Jones suggested using a civilian wireless transmitter (W/T) set instead.

An amateur radio enthusiast built them the right kind of set in a
fortnight. Jones used a simple but effective code based on an alphabetic grid-square with a changing keyword on the top line, and Levi took it back to Italian Military Intelligence in Rome, telling them that he had recruited an (imaginary) agent called Paul Nicossof who would be sending messages in Morse from Cairo. After muddles over frequencies, the first successful transmission from ‘Nicossof' was made one afternoon in July 1941 from a British radio station at Abbassia near Cairo. Jones had encoded a short message from ‘Nicossof' claiming to have made some useful contacts. The signaller tapped out the jumbled letters in Morse code, was rewarded with
grazie
in clear, and then a coded message sent back from Rome.

Jones said later it was ‘undoubtedly the biggest thrill I had in the war'. When he told Maunsell about it the next morning, his boss said, ‘We must get hold of Dudley at once and you had also better bring in SIS.' In his autobiography,
The Road Uphill
, Jones described Clarke as ‘small in stature, humorous, highly intelligent and quick on the uptake', and said he came to like and admire him. What most impressed Jones was Clarke's amazing talent for getting things done. He had access at any time to the Chief of Staff, Arthur Smith, and to Wavell, the Commander-in-Chief, and ‘the whole apparatus of GHQ seemed to be at his disposal!'

Clarke provided Kenyon Jones with the messages that the channel – now code-named
CHEESE
– would send to the Italians. As he became more trusted as a source, his messages went straight to the Abwehr and to Rommel's HQ. Creating the rich
CHEESE
board of ‘notional' contacts in Cairo and across the Middle East was a task handed on to Evan John, an eccentric older writer and artist who had been in the Commandos, then joined the Intelligence Corps, and was posted to SIME in 1941 because, he drily said, he happened to mention ‘in some portly presence' that he once talked with T. E. Lawrence in Oxford.

In his autobiographical memoir
Time in the East
, Evan John described Clarke (whom he only called ‘The Colonel') as ‘a professional soldier with a great love of good English … He had read widely in literature, especially spiteful literature. His combined love for malice and good style naturally led him to the eighteenth century, and he knew his Junius better than – as a thorough-going atheist – he knew his Bible.' John's view of Clarke's character is interesting. You need a sharp edge to be good at deception. Clarke's awareness of
human folly helped him to take advantage of it; a degree of malice may have spurred him on in his attempts to mislead and deceive, but he also knew his stratagems had a useful purpose. When a trick worked, he must have felt delight at many levels, intellectual, creative and patriotic, something more complex than mere spite.

When Clarke arrived in Lisbon on 22 August 1941 to set up ways of distributing deceptive material from the Middle East, he was once again impersonating a bogus journalist, this time in colourful summer shirts. The place was an entrepôt of spooks, heaving with agents and double-dealers from both sides and a natural hub for gossip because flights between England and the Middle East used it as an overnight stopping place, and there were also connections to the USA. Ten days before Clarke arrived, the double agent Dusko Popov had left on a Pan Am flying boat for New York City, carrying in a microdot an Abwehr questionnaire with two dozen questions about the defences of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It might have been read as a warning to the Americans that the Axis were considering a strike, but even though the Federal Bureau of Investigation passed on Popov's information to the army and navy, America was still unprepared when, four months later, on 7 December 1941, hundreds of Japanese war planes attacked US ships and aircraft in Pearl Harbor.

Clarke managed to find sixteen new channels for his misinformation. Some were Germans or Portuguese who could pass documents or information directly, others were Axis-sympathisers or just gossips picked from a floating foreign population that included Americans, French, Spanish and Swiss, ‘of both sexes and mostly of doubtful occupation'. These people were transient, though, and Clarke missed Vladimir Wolfson who had supported him when they were doing the same job in Istanbul a few months earlier, and who could have kept the supply of contacts going.

As Clarke moved around Lisbon and Estoril for almost a month that summer he must at some point have crossed paths with a young man who was in the same city and absolutely desperate to get into the great game. Perhaps they sat in the same cinema, looking up at the
same black and white newsreels, but reading them differently. Had they met, it would have been a most interesting encounter.

Juan Pujol García, a 29-year-old from Barcelona, was the opposite of a professional soldier. His Catalan father was a kindly, ethical, apolitical man who had brought his son up to loathe oppression and war and to believe the pen was mightier than the sword. Pujol was proud that he never fired a shot in the Spanish Civil War: he hid from recruitment, he deserted, he was imprisoned, he improvised, he survived. But when WW2 came, he determined to do the right thing for humanity through practical action that did not involve fighting. He was not a mercenary (unlike Dusko Popov, always a natural businessman doing deals on the side) but an idealist, a bookish and bespectacled person who had passed through occupations from chicken farming to hotel management on his way towards an as yet unknown destiny. He worked hard and could apply himself, but he was better at making things up than making money, and he could talk the hind legs off a donkey.

His father's library had fed Pujol's liberal sympathies. In common with other Spaniards, despite censorship, constant Axis propaganda and the Madrid press baying approval of Hitler's march across Europe, he sometimes managed to hear appalling stories of what the Nazis were doing to people in the extermination camps of Germany and Poland. Like everyone else in the Spanish-speaking world, he was caught up in WW2, willy-nilly.

In January 1941 Pujol approached the British embassy in Madrid and offered to work for them as a secret agent in Germany or Italy, but was turned away. He then went to the German embassy and, boasting of his right-wing credentials, offered to work for them as a secret agent in Lisbon or Great Britain. He was turned away again. But he persisted, and the Germans said they might be interested if he could get himself to Britain. Pujol went to Lisbon to try to get accreditation as a journalist, but in the end managed to get a forged Spanish diplomatic pass by fooling a Portuguese printer that he worked for the Spanish embassy. Back in Madrid he flashed the document and conned two German intelligence officers that he was working with the Spanish security police and would soon be off to England to track down some missing money. Pujol's fast talking and authentic-seeming papers persuaded the Abwehr men that he was
genuine, so they gave him US$3000 and a crash course in writing in invisible ink. A genuine German intelligence officer, Fritz Knappe-Ratey, told him to get in touch with the correspondent of the right-wing newspaper
ABC
in London, Luís Calvo, an established German agent there, and said he could use the Spanish diplomatic bag for messages. Pujol bridled, saying that he hoped the Abwehr would not be so indiscreet with
his
name as they had been with Calvo's, and insisted he preferred to work alone.

Pujol wrapped the roll of dollar notes in a condom, hid it in a tube of toothpaste, and crossed the frontier to Portugal in July 1941. There he went to the British embassy and showed them the secret ink and the list of questions the Abwehr wanted him to find answers to. No interest. He tried again. Someone said they would rendezvous with him, but never turned up. Pujol had already sent a letter to Madrid (who had the largest Abwehr
Kriegsorganisation
outside Germany) falsely announcing his arrival in England. Now he had the mind-boggling task of proving to the Germans that he was a secret agent spying for them in a country he had never visited, in a language he barely spoke. Not yet ‘Our Man in London', just a man on his own in Lisbon, he had to make everything up from scratch.

And so, like any fiction writer doing research, by August Pujol was haunting Lisbon libraries and bookshops, ransacking reference books like the deep red 1937 Baedeker
Great Britain: Handbook for
Travellers
, which had maps and street plans, and
Bradshaw's
Guide to
the British Railways
. He pored over British journals and newspapers, copied down the names of likely firms from advertisements, and stared at any cinema newsreels which had footage from Britain. He bought a big map of Great Britain, a
Blue Guide to England
, an Anglo-French lexicon of military terms, a Portuguese guide to the British Fleet, and sat down in his rented rooms, in Cascais, and then in Estoril, to compose detailed fantasies for his German masters in Madrid.

Is it so incredible that professionally trained Abwehr intelligence officers treated these amateur inventions as true? There is an almost infinite human capacity for self-deception. We like to hear what agrees with us, and what is most agreeable is a confirmation of the prejudices we already hold. We see what we think we are seeing – a mirage in Iraq, a chimera in Afghanistan, a vital secret agent in London.

In September 1941 Clarke, responding to a summons from the Imperial General Staff, the very top of the British defence machinery, came back from Lisbon to a bleaker London. Four months earlier, his elegant little flat in Stratton Street had been destroyed by a parachute mine in the last great Luftwaffe raid of the Blitz. Back in North Africa, what Clarke had once known as ‘Western Desert Force' or ‘the Army of the Nile' was being redesignated the Eighth Army, and they were getting ready for operation
CRUSADER
, Auchinleck's attack on Rommel in Cyrenaica. The Prime Minister hungered to smash Rommel's Afrika Korps, and at this critical moment Clarke was asked to write and circulate a paper on his experience of strategic deception in Middle East Command.

On 29 September, Clarke was introduced to Guy Liddell, MI5's director of counter-espionage, who recorded in his diary that Clarke ‘has many double-cross schemes and controls both rumours and purveying false information through Maunsell's channels. Evidently his operations have been very successful'. Clarke told Liddell about the lessons he had learned from the failure of his stratagems in Ethiopia, but also described the effective ‘notional' reinforcement of Cyprus, where ‘A' Force's cod wireless traffic and dummy tanks had helped to keep the island safe from attack. Liddell saw that things got done quicker in the Middle East because Wavell had ensured deception was part of operations instead of getting stuck further down the food chain in planning or intelligence.

On 1 October, Clarke attended the weekly Wednesday MI5 XX (Double Cross) Committee meeting. The next day he met the people supporting the chiefs of staff at the War Cabinet Office, who had been shown his new paper. Both the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee (chaired by Bill Cavendish-Bentinck, and including the three directors of naval, military and air intelligence) and the Joint Planning Staff (whose directors ran strategic, executive and future operational planning sections) were impressed by what he had written. Clarke talked with Guy Liddell again and arranged to inform MI5 of all his deception plans and to tell them exactly what support he needed. From now on, London and the Middle East were to share full knowledge, using ‘some sort of code within a cipher in order to ensure secrecy' that they had discussed before. (For example, whenever Clarke said ‘counter' he would mean ‘encourage'.) On the subject of
deception, Liddell rather priggishly warned that MI5 ‘could not embark upon a policy of downright lying. We could, however, put forward tentative half-truths.'

On Tuesday, 7 October, Clarke met the joint chiefs of staff themselves. The chairman, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was his old boss at the War Office, John Dill, now a happy widower due to get married again the next day. Clarke already knew Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal from Aden, and Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, the chief of Combined Operations, from his commando days. The next day, the Joint Planning Staff, who had also read Clarke's paper, recommended to the chiefs of staff that a section like ‘A' Force should be set up in the heart of the War Cabinet Office, its mission to control deception worldwide. It was a stunning vindication of Clarke's and Wavell's ideas. The section was to be intrinsic to operations, directly commanded by someone with the staff to plan and execute schemes, and able to draw on the resources of all other branches. The chiefs of staff accepted the plan, and Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, asked Clarke if he would like to become the new section's first controlling officer.

This was the plum job and Clarke could not have been better qualified to do it. But it was also a sweetly poisoned chalice. Clarke was experienced enough to know it was better to be the big fish in a smaller pond that he understood intimately. Further from the centre in the Middle East, he had more direct power and greater operational freedom. Perhaps he enjoyed greater personal freedom too. As would soon emerge, he was sometimes a risk-taker. Out there, he was treated indulgently when he was driven by Corporal Payne from the front of Shepheard's Hotel to GHQ to arrive exactly half an hour late for the commander-in-chief's morning meeting. Here in London, everything he did would be known, and he could be easily ignored, outclassed, outranked and outmanoeuvred. He declined the job on the grounds of loyalty, saying that he was a staff officer serving General Auchinleck and they were currently mid-operation. He added that it was not quite fair to pinch a man's butler when he had been lent you for the night, which made Pound laugh.

Instead the chiefs offered the job to Colonel Oliver Stanley, director of the Future Operations Planning Section. He was not really right for the role, but among the three General Staff officers that Stanley
employed to help him was Dennis Wheatley, whom we last met in 1940 writing a paper for the defence of Britain against Nazi invasion. He had taken up fiction after he lost his wine business in the 1930 slump and came to widespread public attention in 1934 with
The
Devil Rides Out
, a novel which blended a John Buchanesque ‘shocker' of contemporary politics with black magic and gossip. Wheatley now had to do a three-week square-bashing course at Uxbridge in December 1941 to qualify him as a pilot officer in the RAF. Then he lined his blue greatcoat with red silk and had a swagger stick made that concealed a 15-inch blade. His excellent book
The Deception
Planners
, his seventy-fifth, published posthumously in 1980, describes how the new deception system started out ‘near impotence'. It was so secret that they were ‘kept absolutely incommunicado and not even allowed to tell other members of the Joint Planning Staff what we were up to, though actually for several weeks we were not up to anything at all'.

The new deception system, although approved at such a high level, did not really start becoming effective until Wavell once again took a hand from the Far East, sending a telegram to Churchill on 21 May 1942, saying that if deception was not to remain ‘local and ephemeral', it had to be planned and operated from the very centre of strategy. The current approach was too defensive; Wavell suggested ‘a policy of bold imaginative deception' to be worked between London, Washington DC and all the commanders in the field. On that very same day, the chiefs of staff approved Lieutenant Colonel John Bevan as Stanley's replacement.

Why did Wavell show a renewed interest in deception in May 1942? After the Japanese attacked the Americans at Pearl Harbor and launched their onslaught on the British and Dutch Empires in the Far East, Wavell the commander-in-chief of Allied Forces decided that he needed another Dudley Clarke to help him. Early in January 1942 he sent for Peter Fleming who travelled out to India via Cairo where he went through all the ‘A' Force files and talked to Clarke. By late March, Fleming was staying with Wavell in New Delhi, and setting up General Staff Intelligence (Deception) (GSI (d)). ‘It is a one-horse show,' Fleming wrote to Dennis Wheatley, ‘and I am the horse.' The first outing for this steed began over dinner in Delhi one evening in late April 1942, when Wavell told Fleming and Bernard Fergusson
about Allenby's deceptions in Palestine in WW1 and in particular about Richard Meinertzhagen's haversack ruse.

Fleming and Wavell stayed up till one a.m. planning a ruse of their own in Burma, which was later code-named
ERROR
. The Burmese military situation at that moment was critical: the ferociously determined Japanese Imperial Army was advancing from the south and Generals Harold Alexander and Bill Slim were trying to manage the successful retreat of British, Chinese and Indian forces northwards from Rangoon to Mandalay and then north-east towards the Indian frontier. Operation error intended to convince Japanese Intelligence that the British commander-in-chief, Wavell himself, had had a car accident during a hurried last minute visit to the front, leaving behind a briefcase of his important secret papers.