Churchill's Wizards (47 page)

Borges's real-life friend Adolfo Bioy Casares appears on the first page of the fiction ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' as the man who quotes the (invented) heretical saying that ‘mirrors and copulation are abominable because they multiply the numbers of men'. Bioy and Borges first met in 1932 through the Argentine avant-garde magazine
Sur
, and Bioy was impressed by Borges's essays, ‘The Postulation of Reality' (1931) and ‘Narrative Art and Magic' (1932) which are precisely about how writers get readers to suspend disbelief and accept the illusory truth they have created by skilful use of detail and atmosphere. The pair decided to write parody detective stories together in December 1941.

Meanwhile Pujol and Harris began collaborating in a similar way in London. Working from an office in Jermyn Street and a five-bedroomed MI5 safe house in Crespigny Road, Hendon (a respectable, mostly Jewish neighbourhood), they scripted what was in effect a serial novel or a soap-opera for the Abwehr in which two dozen busy sub-agent characters came and went, rose and fell, busily compiling a farrago of facts, figures and useful information. At the centre of it was the narrator and principal character whom the Germans knew as
ARABEL
and the British, at first, by the unglamorous code-name
BOVRIL
. But Pujol was such a good actor that the British soon changed his name from a beef extract to a movie star,
GARBO
. Pujol grew into his leading role as the top German secret agent in Britain. The character that he and Harris co-wrote was that of a hard-working diva, assiduous, bossy, demanding in the touchy way of ‘talent', quick to take offence if not assuaged and flattered, pouring out endless thoughts and suggestions in a pompous and flowery Spanish style that is worthy of Borges and Bioy's creation, H. Bustos Domecq.

Harris's sister Enriqueta Harris Frankfort later became a world authority on Velázquez and Goya. In WW2 she was working in the Ministry of Information, and fed scraps of detail to Harris and Pujol, who used them to invent an unwitting source of intelligence referred to as J (3). J (3) was supposed to be an official high up in the Spanish section of the Ministry of Information with whom
ARABEL/GARBO
had been able to ingratiate himself by posing as an exiled Republican writing cheerful propaganda for distribution in Spain. J (3) would become a key source of governmental contacts and ‘secret' documents for
GARBO
. Absolutely none of this was real, of course.
La vida es
sueño
, life's a dream, as they said in the Spanish Golden Age.

In Winston Churchill's huge narrative history of WW2, the turning point comes in the fourth volume, aptly entitled
The Hinge of Fate
, which shows that the 1942 North African campaign was a crucial step on the path to victory. 1942 dawned gloomily with military disasters for the Allies everywhere, but ended on a much more promising note. ‘This is not the end,' said Churchill on 10 November 1942. ‘It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning.' It was the year when British
camoufleurs
, British double agents, British military deceivers and British black propagandists fell into step.

In his autobiographical
Deceivers Ever: Memoirs of a Camouflage
Officer
, Steven Sykes (who kept a contemporaneous diary of his ‘scurrying about' through the Western Desert and European D-Day) noted that things were changing in 1942, but did not quite grasp the importance of the man who came to put them in place.

Sykes is referring to ‘A' Force's deception plan
BASTION
, which attempted to block Rommel's advance into Egypt at the beginning of 1942 by making him think he was running into a trap at the Gazala line. Hiding tanks in Bedouin tents was an old British trick that Rommel was very well aware of and had even copied. Accordingly, on 15 February Victor Jones put up 150 (in fact empty) tents deep in the desert behind the left wing of the British army, and surrounded them
with faked tank tracks, people moving about and lots of dummy wireless traffic.

In March the writer Julian Trevelyan came out to Egypt to report on the new techniques of camouflage in the Middle East for the authorities in the UK. He saw Colonel Geoffrey Barkas, the head of camouflage at GHQ, who told him about the complexity of deception in the desert:

Trevelyan went west in a truck with a dour driver called Jock Harris. They passed burnt-out aeroplanes and overturned German and Italian lorries on the way to bomb-scarred Tobruk and Eighth Army HQ, a scatter of tents and vehicles in a shallow
wadi
. They visited an armoured brigade in no-man's-land, navigating by compass through a terrain with no landmarks, thumping and rattling over an endless succession of prickly and stony patches. This was not the Foreign Legion desert of the movies, shifting dunes and plodding camels, but ‘a remorseless plain of glaring stone and dust'. Past ‘Knightsbridge', a lonely crossroads marked by petrol cans, they pressed on to ‘some tanks dressed up as trucks, and to some old trucks dressed up as tanks, bumping along over the stones with flapping skirts like old Cockney dowagers'.

The adventurous soldier David Smiley commanded a ‘squadron' of eighteen such dummy Crusader tanks, and found the life congenial. Hot days and cold nights were healthy, and co-operating with real tanks was good fun. Once a map error by Divisional HQ sent them too close to an Italian fort. They had been shadowed by a German reconnaissance plane, popularly known as the ‘
shufti-wallah
', who duly summoned Stuka bombers to attack them. But to Smiley's delight and amazement the German planes accidentally bombed the Italian tanks that had sallied forth from the Rotunda Segnali to see what was going on. When Smiley's unit, 101 Royal Tank Regiment, were equipped with some of the first dummies of the new American Grant tanks, they were so secret that they were wrapped in sacking before
they left Cairo, and were unveiled at night, 500 miles away in the desert, so they cropped up like mushrooms in the morning.

On 2 April Trevelyan talked with Sykes, ‘the most intelligent and sympathetic camouflage officer that I have yet met out here', and then drove the long and bumpy road to ‘one of Camouflage's show-pieces in the desert':

Trevelyan was with another camouflage officer the next day when enemy fighter planes machine-gunned them by their broken-down car. Armour-piecing bullets splintered the stones beside him as he squirmed into the ground. Shaken, the two men returned to find the
camoufleurs
' camp in commotion, a wrecked lorry burning and everything shot up except the dummy railhead. Trevelyan said the Germans ‘later paid it the compliment, I believe, of dropping a wooden bomb on it'.

But Tobruk fell on 21 June and a week later two British corps were shattered at Mersa Matruh. There was a disorganised retreat east to the Nile Delta; the Royal Navy left the harbour at Alexandria causing ‘
panique
' in the city's high society. Privileged and well-connected womenfolk were evacuated from Cairo to Palestine, and everyone else had contingency plans to evade German occupation. So much paperwork was torched in Cairo during what became known as ‘The Flap' that 1 July 1942 was dubbed ‘Ash Wednesday'. You could buy peanuts in twists of paper headed ‘MOST SECRET'. They had gone up unburnt in the hot smoke and then fluttered down all over Cairo.

When all seemed lost, Auchinleck boldly took personal command of the Eighth Army. He reorganised them into battle groups, and with his back to the Nile, halted Rommel's advance at the First Battle of El Alamein in July 1942. Dudley Clarke's deception plan for 1st Alamein was called operation
SENTINEL
. As usual it drew on his well-stocked chest of ‘notional' forces. ‘A' Force whirled up a
khamsin
of camouflage and deception to buy the British some time.
SENTINEL
managed to persuade German Intelligence that there was an army camped in the sandhills before them. Through the dust of bogus
activity the Germans seemed to glimpse at least two motorised divisions and a light armoured brigade. Faced by such a force and with his supply lines stretched, Rommel could not press forward. Auchinleck did not win a decisive victory, but he held the pass.

British security had to grow tighter now. The British captured Rommel's radio monitoring station ‘
Schildkrote
' (Tortoise) at Tel al Aysa the same month, and discovered that Rommel's SIGINT unit (621st Signals Battalion) had learned about British plans and the Allied order of battle from careless wireless traffic. The Germans had also broken the US military attaché's code. Two German signallers were both found to possess copies of Daphne du Maurier's best-selling novel
Rebecca
in English, although they didn't speak a word of the language. The books were in fact being used for coding and decoding messages from two German spies who had been working in Cairo with the Egyptian Army officer Anwar El Sadat. Driven across the desert from Rommel's HQ in May by the explorer Laszlo Almasy (fictionalised in Michael Ondaatje's
The English Patient
), the spies, code-named kondor, now lived on a sleazy houseboat near Cairo's Zamalek Bridge with a transmitting wireless hidden inside a large radiogram. They had been spending Abwehr-forged English
£
5 notes in Shepheard's Hotel, Groppi's, the Turf Club and the Kit Kat Club. Sansom of Field Security managed to track them down and in a raid on their houseboat at 2 a.m. on 25 July, the agents failed to throw their matching copy of
Rebecca
, with an already encoded message, into the Nile. The British then turned this to their own advantage by using the spies' radio to send false messages to Rommel as if from
KONDOR
, expressing ‘British fears' of an attack on the vulnerable Alam el Halfa Ridge (which in fact was heavily defended). The false messages were accompanied by a classic haversack ruse. A bloodstained British armoured car was left half wrecked and abandoned on the edge of a minefield for the Germans to find. It yielded for the eyes of enemy intelligence a map deceptively marked up for armoured vehicles: hard ground was deemed ‘impassable' while the soft sift that drained three times as much precious fuel was indicated as ‘good going'.

On 8 August, Churchill's impatience for movement drove him to a controversial decision: he sacked Auchinleck. In some people's view, Auchinleck had saved the entire Middle East by outmanouevring
Rommel at 1st Alamein, but halting the German advance was not, in Churchill's view, enough. He made General Harold Alexander, the man who successfully brought out the rearguard from Dunkirk, the new Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, and on 13 August 1942 the egotistical General Bernard Montgomery took over Eighth Army.

The controversial Montgomery was alert enough to understand that this army – the first real Commonwealth army – was evolving its own characteristics, particularly as regards dress, or the lack of it. The style of the ‘Desert Rats' is well caught in ‘The Two Types', cartoons by Jon (W. J. Jones) that appeared in various British Army newspapers at the end of the war. Monty came out wearing a conventional red-banded officer's peaked cap, but soon, seeing that other ‘Desert Rat' officers found suede boots, silk scarves, and sheepskin jackets more comfortable than service-issue uniforms in the heat and cold of the dusty Western Desert, he swapped his cap for an Anzac bush hat, finally settling for his characteristic double-badged tank commander's black beret, worn with jerseys and corduroys. Appearances in Cairo, though, were deceptive. If you saw casually dressed officers in Cairo, they were probably ‘gabardine swine', desk-bound box-wallahs disguising themselves in scruffy camouflage to look authentic, whereas the real fighters from the desert or Special Service were more likely to show up in Shepheard's or the Mohammed Ali Club in immaculately correct uniform. Montgomery already knew Dudley Clarke, having taught him infantry tactics when Clarke was one of the candidates re-sitting the Staff College exams in 1931. Montgomery was a good teacher, for ‘the whole thing became plain and simple' to Clarke, who scored well in the exam. A dozen years on, he told Clarke that ‘A' Force now needed to prepare deception plans for the Second Battle of Alamein, which was due to begin on 23 October, the night of the full moon.

Clarke delegated the spadework for the deception that helped to win this battle. He had just had a visitor from LCS, a rather brilliant regular soldier called Lieutenant Colonel David Strangeways who let him into a big secret. In early November, the Americans were going to be landing at the other end of North Africa, on the coasts of Algeria and Morocco. This was operation torch, and lots of strategic deceptions would be needed to avert enemy eyes from the area. Clarke was to go to Washington DC and London to help with that.

The
camoufleurs
Geoffrey Barkas and Tony Ayrton had to take over.
On 16 September, two days after Clarke talked to Montgomery, they went to see Montgomery's Chief of Staff, Brigadier Freddie de Guingand. They heard the plan of attack, which was rather like WW1, face to face with no open flanks. The battle would have to be stage-managed so as to blast a hole in the enemy front through which forces could pour. Montgomery needed the help of the
camoufleurs
, and said they would be given full resources and ‘Operational Priority'. In the north, Montgomery needed concealment for the real attack: in the south, he needed a big display to suggest the attack was really coming there, delayed until November by problems with the American Sherman tanks. The goal was to hold up half of Rommel's armour in the south.

Operation
BERTRAM
, the overall deception plan for the Second Battle of Alamein, was made up of seven subsidiary operations which all interlocked in a complex version of the three-card trick, or pea-and-thimble. The deceptive camouflage experts had learned that the objects they were using did not have to stay the same: both appearance and reality could change, especially if the switch was performed at night. The netted coves at Tobruk first hid real ships, then half-concealed fake ones. A supply dump could be made to look like a lorry, the lorry could look like a tank, and a tank could hide itself inside an apparent supply dump. A ‘Cannibal' was a device which from the air looked like a lorry in a dispersed park of other lorries. When the poles and canvas of each ‘lorry' were pulled down, however, they revealed either a 25-pounder gun-howitzer with its limber, or the Quad gun-tractor that towed them. There were 400 such guns, in batteries increasingly coordinated by wireless.

Ayrton and the illustrator Brian Robb were in charge of what Churchill called ‘a number of ingenious deceptive measures and precautions'. In the north, the Royal Army Service Corps had 6,000 tons of stores and supplies to hide near the front, over half of it near El Alamein railway station. On the ground Ayrton and Robb found a hundred sections of slit trench, nicely lined with masonry. An extra facing of War Department petrol tins, stacked three high, hid two thousand tons of fuel undetectable from the air, with good ventilation for the notoriously leaky containers. The food stores were stacked at night in the shapes of three-ton trucks and covered with a standard camouflage net pegged properly so extra stores could fit under the
wings. Other stores went into ordinary soldiers' bivouac tents. From the air, the whole dense assemblage looked just like any other congregation of thin-skinned vehicles dotted about the desert.