Churchill's Wizards (46 page)

Clarke the novelist never forgets the accessories. As in deception operations, the slightest wrong or missing detail may draw attention to itself and bring the whole illusion crashing down. The novel ends with a paean of love for a present from a rich admirer:

Perhaps he took fetishistic pleasure in women's clothing; perhaps he also sometimes enjoyed wearing it; perhaps dressing up as a woman really did seem to him the best way of disguising his identity when making a contact: all three things could be true. He was small (5' 7” according to his passport) and slight, and with the gloves on he does make quite a plausible woman in the photographs. Or perhaps it was less complicated, and Clarke just wanted to have fun.

The Germans may have actually sprung Clarke from prison, as Liddell says, but the British naval attaché in Madrid, Alan Hillgarth, who had good relations with the Spanish authorities, certainly helped. Hillgarth worked both for Sir Samuel Hoare, the British Ambassador in Madrid, and for John Godfrey, the director of Naval Intelligence in London, and managed to thwart Italian and German machinations in Spain while maintaining all the diplomatic proprieties of formal Spanish neutrality. Certainly it was Hillgarth who obtained and sent to London the Spanish police photographs of Clarke, both in drag and out of it, where they were circulated as far as Churchill himself (who took a personal interest in Clarke's escapade). They aroused considerable interest and, reading between the lines of the memos, some amusement:

It was probably Alan Hillgarth who conveyed Clarke safely back to British territory in Gibraltar, from where Clarke was recalled to London to explain himself; in other ways, too, his troubles were not yet over. The next convoy's sailing from Gibraltar was delayed. Enemy submarines had just sunk a British tanker and a freighter in the Atlantic west of Gibraltar, and the Royal Navy sent out a dozen warships to conduct anti-U-boat sweeps. The Admiralty knew from decoding German wireless traffic that a group of six U-boats, code-named
Breslau
, were deployed in the approaches to the Straits of Gibraltar. One had been sunk by the British and the others had withdrawn, but only temporarily, to the west where four Italian submarines were also lurking. They had certainly not given up.

Convoy HG-75, comprising eighteen merchant ships, left Gibraltar for Britain at 4 p.m. on 22 October. Dudley Clarke was on the
Ariosto
, a new merchantman out of Hull which was carrying the convoy's commodore and a cargo of cork and ore. The ships were escorted by three British destroyers; nine other Royal Navy warships of the 37th Escort Group had sailed ahead an hour and half earlier to hunt for U-boats. But German agents in Ceuta and Algeciras immediately signalled the departure of the convoy to the commander of the U-boats and within half an hour the U-boats knew too.

As the ships headed into the Atlantic, the British destroyers escorting the convoy were alerted that enemy submarines were around by their own pinging sonar echoes coming off the submarine hulls and by ‘Huff-Duff' from the Admiralty. The High Frequency Direction Finder or HF/DF system located enemy submarines via high-frequency, short-burst radio transmissions which they could only make on the surface. When Allied listening stations in Britain, Canada and the Caribbean detected a high-frequency German submarine signal, they drew a line on the map to it. The intersection of several of these ‘cuts' gave a rough location. On the second night out, two British corvettes from the 37th Escort Group had just finished chasing
a sonar contact when there was a red explosion at the rear of the convoy. The destroyer HMS
Cossack
, astern of the port wing, had been torpedoed by
U
-563 about 250 miles west of Gibraltar. The destroyer's bridge was blazing fiercely and its short-range ammunition was exploding in the heat. Cold men on oval Carley Float life rafts sang in a darkness illuminated by their burning ship. HMS
Carnation
picked up forty-nine survivors.

Six hours later, in the darkness before the dawn of 24 October, U-564, skippered by 25-year-old Reinhard Suhren, fired five torpedoes at the convoy and then escaped. The torpedoes hit three separate British cargo ships at ten-second intervals, the
Carsbreck
, the
Alhama
and the
Ariosto
, which was carrying Dudley Clarke.
Carsbreck
, loaded with 6,000 tons of iron ore, sank like a stone within a minute.
Alhama
lingered for ten minutes before foundering in a sea made chiaroscuro by the escort ships firing star shells and fierce white flares called ‘snowflakes' high into the sky. On the
Ariosto
, six men died in the explosion, but the forty-five other crew and passengers had five minutes to get to the boats and rafts before the ship went down. As he scrambled to escape, Clarke wondered if it were true that, being born with a caul over his head, he was not meant to drown. Most of the
Ariosto
survivors were picked up by a Swedish ship, but Clarke was among the seven rescued by the British destroyer HMS
Lamberton
. He was lucky in more ways than one. The
Lamberton
ran low on fuel chasing the U-boats and was forced to double back to Gibraltar, together with its unexpected passenger. By the end of October, Clarke was restored to the Rock. The breathing space seems to have given the authorities in London time to calm down about the incident in Spain. People in high places may also have realised that there had been a risk of Clarke drowning when the
Ariosto
went down, taking with him the secrets of many plans not yet executed, or of his being captured by the Germans, with even more frightful results. His value to the war effort may therefore have suddenly become clearer. All this allowed Clarke to bargain with fate.

A message from Sir John Dill to Churchill on 31 October records that Clarke had sent a telegram to London the night before telling them about the torpedoing and asking ‘whether he is still to come back to U.K.' or whether he should go on to Egypt to return to his duties. It must be remembered that Dill had an old liking for Clarke.
In the first weeks of Dill's appointment as CIGS Clarke had done good service as his military secretary. Now Dill played a central role in finessing Clarke's return to favour. In the missive to Churchill Dill pointed out that Clarke had already been delayed ‘about a week' by the ‘mischance' with the U-boat, and also said that he was ‘wanted in the Middle East', that is, by Auchinleck, who was ‘in the best position to take proper disciplinary action with knowledge of all the facts'. Dill suggested to Churchill that Clarke could be dealt with out in Gibraltar, where he could be questioned by Field Marshal Lord Gort, Governor of Gibraltar. If Gort considered Clarke's story ‘reasonable' and if he found him to be ‘sound in mind and body', Dill says Gort should ‘send him on to Middle East by first possible aircraft as he is urgently required there'. Churchill approved Dill's suggestion on 1 November.

Unsurprisingly, the master of deception indeed managed to convince Lord Gort that he was fit to return to duty. The long report Gort wrote is nowhere to be found, but John Dill's account of it is recorded in a minute to Churchill on 18 November. Dill advised Churchill that the report was ‘of such length that you certainly should not be bothered to read it'. (Or perhaps Dill thought the report contained damaging information about Clarke.) He told Churchill that ‘the Report clearly shows that Col. Clarke showed no signs of insanity but undertook a foolhardy and misjudged action with a definite purpose, for which he had rehearsed his part beforehand'. Dill's partial quotation from the covering letter Lord Gort wrote for the report begs some questions, beginning as it does ‘… heseems in all other respects to be mentally stable'. In which respects had Lord Gort judged Clarke
not
to be mentally stable? The quotation from Gort's letter continues: ‘We can reasonably expect that this escapade and its consequences will have given him a sufficient shock to make him more prudent in the immediate future.' Gort accordingly sent Clarke back to the Middle East, and Dill says, ‘We can safely leave it to General Auchinleck to deal with him, both from a disciplinary point of view and as regards further employment in his special role.'

Churchill's curiosity was evidently aroused, and he sent Dill's message straight back with ‘a definite purpose' underlined and the handwritten question underneath ‘CIGS. What was his purpose? WSC.' Dill replied, ‘Colonel Dudley Clarke had worked up contact
with certain German or German-controlled elements, with a view, later, to their providing a channel for the dissemination of false information which was designed to provide a “cover” for British operations (in the Middle East).' This seems to have satisfied Churchill; Clarke was sent back to Egypt, and there is no evidence that he was ever disciplined.

By the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942, the horrors of the World War had spread far beyond the Atlantic Ocean, the deserts of North Africa, and the plains of Western Europe. In June 1941, Nazi Germany had launched
BARBAROSSA
, attacking the Soviet Union with 150 divisions, and by December German troops were forty miles from Moscow. On 7 December the Japanese launched their crippling air attack on the US Navy at Pearl Harbor and all American bases across the Pacific, before going on to demolish the British and Dutch Empires in the Far East, overrunning Hong Kong and Singapore, and driving the British out of Borneo, Burma and Malaya. This became one of the darkest periods of the whole bloody conflict.

But the great giants were now in the struggle; the USA had joined the World War and both they and the USSR were fighting a common enemy. In the endgame, though British brains did their bit, Russian blood and American treasure would bring down the Axis of Germany, Italy and Japan.

In December 1941, the month when the USA joined the war against the Axis, a small book of seven short stories appeared in Buenos Aires. The opening tale's arresting first sentence – ‘I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the meeting of a mirror and an encyclopaedia' – sounded like a mysterious cipher. The stories were by Jorge Luis Borges, the 42-year-old poet, essayist and librarian who disliked Nazis in Argentina, and consistently wrote in favour of the Allies during WW2. The seventh story, the one which gave the volume its title,
El
jardín
de
senderos
que se
bifurcan
or ‘The Garden of Forking Paths', is about the mysteries of time, but is also a detective story involving WW1 espionage. Yu Tsun, a Chinese spy in England has to communicate a place name in France to his spymasters in Imperial Germany. He therefore kills a scholar whose surname, Albert, is the same as the town on the Somme, so the newspapers will carry his message to Berlin. ‘The Garden of Forking Paths' was republished in December 1944 together with nine more stories in the momentous volume
Ficciones
or
Fictions
. In WW1, camouflage and cubism developed side by side; in WW2, deception grew into an infinitely branching series of Borgesian fictions.

As the war wound towards its climax, nothing was really what it seemed. Take the brutal lot of British prisoners of war: their regime of mind-numbing routine was, for the bulk of the 140,000 PoWs held in Europe, just that: a hard, hungry, tedious life. Only a small percentage of PoWS tried to escape. But escape remained the Holy Grail, particularly among officers, who did not have to work in their camps, unlike the ‘other ranks' who were treated like slave labour. These officers felt it was their duty to make things difficult for their captors by trying to get out. So, from time to time the dull prison camp routine was concealing a busy hive of subversive activities. Classic postwar
accounts of PoW activities like Eric Williams's
The Wooden Horse
(1949) and Paul Brickhill's
The Great Escape
(1951) focus on dogged British attempts to fool the prison guards or ‘goons' with an elaborate pretence of normality. A loitering man is really on the alert; a closing window is a signal; behind the false wall is a hiding place; under the lavatory is a wireless set receiving coded messages via the BBC, and so on. ‘Stooges' keep watch for ‘ferrets' or ‘snoops' while artistic and mechanical work goes on – the painstaking forging by hand of correctly stamped, sealed and embossed German ID and travel passes or the tailoring of fake civilian clothes from blankets or uniforms with the nap shaved off. Tiny compasses were engineered from melted gramophone records and 78 rpm needles, and underground railways were put together from bedsteads and beading. As everyone who has seen John Sturges's film of
The Great Escape
knows, seventy-six air force officers got out of Stalag Luft III in March 1944. Three reached England, but all the rest were recaptured. Fifty were shot by the Gestapo, on Adolf Hitler's orders.

The books and films of the 1940s and 1950s imply that the prisoners of war improvised, stole or scrounged everything themselves. Censorship shaped by official secrecy did not allow the authors to tell the whole truth. Prisoners could receive parcels from voluntary and charitable organisations on the outside. (These were not the Red Cross boxes, which had to be respected under the Geneva Conventions.) Some of these charity parcels had blankets, scarves, underwear, clothing, etc., others contained books, puzzles, paper, pencils, playing cards, sports equipment, musical instruments and other entertainments for bored men confined in the
Stammlager
. Parcels from the Licensed Victuallers' Sports Association or the Welsh Provident Fund, for example, might contain a box of Monopoly, the property board game with paper play-money and little wooden red hotels and green houses. Made by Waddington's, these Monopoly sets looked and felt completely kosher. Yet if you peeled away the London streets from Old Kent Road to Mayfair, inside the folding board you might find several useful maps of your part of Germany, printed on silk squares. These Get-Out-of-Jail-Free cards came courtesy of the ingenious Clayton Hutton, technical officer of MI9, the British secret service dedicated to escape and evasion, whose Middle East section Dudley Clarke also ran.

In his remarkable autobiography,
Official Secret
, Hutton reveals how, as well as designing compact ration packs for airmen who were in danger of being captured by the enemy, he hid compasses in fly-buttons, fretsaws in pencils, and flexible Gigli saws in the bootlaces of flying boots with false heels. He also tells of sending escape aids (from batteries to blades, crystal wireless sets to wire cutters) into the PoW camps hidden inside innocuous items such as cricket bats, skittles or chess sets, and entire maps divided among fifty-two playing cards in a sealed pack. The PoW books and movies of the 1950s and 1960s were never allowed to reveal that one officer on every camp's ‘escape committee' would be in regular secret communication with London, so that requests and information could be sent both ways coded in innocent-looking letters from wives, girlfriends, family members.

In particular, these told the prisoners which special parcels to look out for among the innocent ones. German money stitched into book covers, together with the tobacco, cocoa and coffee sent in legitimate food parcels, could be used to bribe guards and for escapers' expenses. After this method was discovered, the Germans started ripping all the covers off all books, so Hutton arranged for the pressing of special 78 rpm records with money hidden in the centre, under the label around the hole. Among Hutton's clothing parcels were woollen blankets specially selected with the help of the Wool Association to be easily converted into suits, apparently new issue RAF and Marine uniforms which, once stripped of British insignia, matched Luftwaffe uniforms. There were also packets of handkerchiefs tied up with black and white ribbons that just happened to match those from which Iron Crosses dangled. The ingenuity the British showed in trying to help their men behind the wire was remarkable, and even when the escapes did not work, it kept the Germans on their toes and helped to raise morale.

But MI9 was not the only secret service hiding things. SOE had an entire unit, largely recruited from film-industry buyers, craftsmen and prop-makers, dedicated to camouflaging anything in everything. Section XV was based at the Thatched Barn roadhouse on the Barnet bypass, not far from Elstree Film Studios, and was run by a large genial man called J. Elder Wills who worked with Paul Robeson on
Song of Freedom
and was involved in the early days of Hammer Films. He made two training films for the Army School of Camouflage, where he also built dummy planes and tanks, before
coming to SOE late in 1941 and starting his first workshop in January 1942. Their camouflage section became used to hiding ammunition, stores, weapons and wirelesses or almost anything else in all kinds of boxes. They could hide microfilms and messages virtually anywhere, and they could make sniper suits and hides which exactly matched the foliage of a specific region, or cobble Japanese split-toe boots or sneakers that left an apparently bare footprint, for use in the Far East.

SOE disguised its people with careful copies of authentic refugees' clothes, taken apart and examined by foreign tailors for cut and stitching and made up by specially recruited seamstresses in London's garment district south of Oxford Street. Getting the right labels, collars and collar studs, buttons and buttonholes, even drilling off the name ‘Lightning' on a zip-fastener, were all part of the attention to detail. For the shabbier parts of Europe, clothes and luggage were carefully aged, scuffed and distressed. Realistic foreign identity papers required a forgery section, whose staff of fifty, including several craftsmen whose extensive holidays at His Majesty's Pleasure meant their credentials were well known to Scotland Yard, produced over 275,000 authentic-looking documents. The make-up section in Knightsbridge provided agents with wigs, gum pads, nose plugs, hair and skin dyes, spectacles, special dentistry and even plastic surgery.

SOE equipped its agents with deadly devices that could have come from Q's toyshop. There were guns that slid up a sleeve or were hidden in a pen, thumb-knives stitched into a lapel, exploding briefcases and incendiary luggage. They designed a range of bombs and booby traps and tyre bursters that looked like an amazing range of everyday objects, from bicycle pumps and books to tobacco boxes and toothpaste tubes.

The most common disguise for bombs for sabotage use was probably the lump of coal, since this was the usual fuel for train locomotives, boiler houses and power stations. A film-set plasterer called Wally Bull moulded the first fake coal in two plaster halves that were then crimped together around the explosive. Later models had liquid plaster poured around a metal general-purpose explosive charge, so showed no join at all. Section XV produced about 3½ tons of explosive ‘coal' between 1941 and 1945, as well as 43,700 incendiary or explosive ‘cigarettes' for SOE agents.

Section XV's work manufacturing devices and gadgets for the secret
armies was keenly examined by King George VI in SOE's demonstration showroom at the Natural History Museum in London. He thus continued the tradition of his father, who had inspected Wilkinson and Solomon's camouflage at the Royal Academy and in Hyde Park in WW1.

Borges said that whatever is imagined becomes real. He liked to mix the real with the fantastic, to slip invented books on to the library shelves next to genuine ones, or to have a known writer review an imaginary text, shuffling truth and fiction just as deceivers like Dudley Clarke and Sefton Delmer did in the war. In his story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', a group of men invent a fantastic ideal world which then begins to intrude into the real one. Peculiar objects called
hrönir
start materialising. Some are better versions of something that was lost, others were previously unknown. Purest and weirdest are the
ur
: things produced by suggestion, created by the power of hope.

The eventual meeting between Juan Pujol and British Intelligence seems like just such an intrusion of the fictional into the real. The situation was both serious and absurd. Pujol was living in Lisbon but pretending to be in London for the benefit of his Abwehr controller in Madrid. He had invented an elaborate charade in which he said he had bribed a KLM pilot to bring his secret messages (written in invisible ink in between the lines of ordinary letters) from London to a bank in Portugal where the Germans could pick them up (in fact he wrote and delivered them himself in Lisbon). He had sent his histrionic wife Araceli Gonzales to Madrid to check whether the Abwehr actually believed him. There she pretended to be a jealous wife, saying she knew Pujol was just away having an affair with some tart, thus forcing the Germans to reassure her that, no, he was doing useful work for them in London, and not to worry. The Abwehr really did think that he was a top agent.

By then Pujol was seriously worrying the British. Since October 1941 they had monitored and decrypted his messages at the point when they were transmitted by the Abwehr from Madrid to Berlin. Apparently this ‘Agent
ARABEL
' had gained sub-agents in Glasgow, Liverpool and the West Country, and was about to get a job at the BBC. A message that happened to be partially true, about a convoy to Malta, rattled MI5. An Abwehr spy at large in England, neither
interned nor turned, could threaten the nineteen double agents that Tar Robertson was already running as well as the whole superstructure of the Double Cross committee. Yet who was this
ARABEL
or
ARABAL
? MI5 realised there was something funny about him as an agent. He was unable to understand English pounds, shillings and pence, knew nothing about regiments and said, oddly, that people in Glasgow would do anything ‘for a litre of wine'. Much of his information was patently untrue. Could they be sure this man was not still in Iberia? Lots of the German agents in Lisbon and Madrid lied to get more pay. Might
arabel
be one of the fantasts?

Meanwhile, Pujol had only heard once from the Abwehr. They wanted many more details about troop movements. Pujol, who barely spoke English, knew nothing about the British military set-up and had no British contacts to help him concoct anything plausible. He was about to give up when either he or his wife had one last try at the American embassy in Lisbon. The USA was two months into the war and the US Naval Attaché, Edward Rousseau, was bright enough to realise he had landed some sort of a fish. Rousseau contacted the British; eventually in February 1942 they put two and two together and realised that Juan Pujol García and arabel were the same man, potentially a most valuable double agent. But who was he going to work for? MI6 wanted him in Lisbon, MI5 wanted him in London – but MI5 won.

Pujol was quietly shipped on a British freighter from Estoril to Gibraltar, from where he flew to England, apprehensive, balding, bearded. When he landed at Plymouth on 24 April, there were two MI5 officers waiting to meet him at the foot of the steps. One was an Englishman, Cyril Mills, who said his name was Mr Grey, and the other was Tomás Harris, a lean dark handsome man with swept back hair who spoke fluent
castellano
because he was half Spanish. Pujol shook his hand. It was a firm grip. Then Harris put his arm round Pujol's shoulder in a gesture of protection and friendship.
Bienvenido
,
hombre
. This Pujol liked; they trusted each other at once.

Tomás ‘Tommy' Harris, the wealthy and well-educated son of Lionel Harris, a Jewish picture dealer from Hampstead who knew Solomon J. Solomon, followed his father into picture dealing, became a friend of Anthony Blunt's and later published a classic account of Goya's etchings. Soon Harris and Pujol became a key double act of WW2, partners in the creation of fictions, like Borges and Bioy Casares.