The illusionist, p.11
The Illusionist, page 11
The grim struggle for this ancient port dominated the summer of 1941. For Rommel, capturing it would have given him a way to bring food, water and fuel up to within 80 miles of the Egyptian border by sea. And even a general as careless of supply lines as the German commander wasn’t going to risk much more of an advance while his enemy had a stronghold like this to his rear.
The town was held in the early months of the siege by the 9th Australian Division. Even for soldiers who prided themselves on toughness, it was a brutal business. Much of the North African fighting of the Second World War involved motion, great advances and retreats by the two sides’ armoured units. But at Tobruk, both sides dug in. For the defenders, there were all the privations of desert life – unbearable heat in the day, freezing cold at night, sand and flies everywhere – with the added dangers of continual shelling and bombing. Their diet consisted of bully beef, biscuits and vitamin pills and everything – even much of the water the defenders needed – had to be brought in by ship on moonless nights.
In the midst of this, Proud set about doing what he could to conceal truth and project falsehood. He recruited a team from the stragglers who had got separated from their units and were stuck in Tobruk, and sent them out on scrounging missions. A consignment of spoiled flour was mixed into a paste he used to paint onto vehicles, helmets, tents and anything else that needed disguising, using sand to darken it where necessary. In the harbour, the barges used to ferry in supplies were hidden under netted covers stretched between half-sunk wrecks. Tobruk’s three remaining Hurricane fighters were also hidden, and a fake airfield built to draw fire. To provide further targets for the enemy, Proud set up dummy gun pits and vehicle parks.
It was in his protection of the town’s water-distilling plant that Proud put his cinematic skills to best use. There was no point trying to hide the distillery. The Italians, who had occupied Tobruk until a few months previously, knew very well both its location and its importance. So Proud took a more subtle approach. He assembled a team who hid in trenches near the plant and waited for the next attack. The moment a bomb fell close enough, they went to work. They dug fake bomb-holes, and darkened them with coal dust and waste oil so that they’d appear deeper. They scattered cement dust and rubble, and rolled broken-down vehicles on their sides. They blew up an unused cooling tower, and on the roof of the distillery, working to plans Proud had drawn up beforehand, they painted a huge patch of tar to simulate a gaping hole.
Peter Proud knew an awful lot about how to make things convincing for the camera, and from the air, this looked just like a destroyed building. The bombers, sure they had done their job, left it alone.
Back in Cairo, change was afoot. Churchill, anxious for victories and unsympathetic to explanations of the difficulties of modern desert warfare, had lost patience with Wavell before Battleaxe, but the operation’s failure settled the question. At the end of June, the prime minister sent the commander a cable, telling him that ‘after the long strain you have borne, a new eye and a new hand are required in this most seriously menaced theatre.’
He was to be sent to India, and the commander there, Claude Auchinleck, was to come to Cairo. Auchinleck had moved swiftly to put down the coup in Iraq that summer, and Churchill had persuaded himself that this showed he was a more dynamic general.
For Wavell, there was no disguising the fact that it was a demotion. The news can hardly have come as a surprise to him, and he bore it with equanimity. Men under his command had suffered worse fates than dismissal, and he knew it. One of the many poems he could quote from memory was Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘The General’, which describes a First World War commander cheerfully greeting soldiers who are about to be slaughtered because his plans are flawed.
‘We have had some setbacks, some successes,’ Wavell told the gathered war correspondents at Grey Pillars. One of them wrote afterwards: ‘I saw suddenly how sincere he was, how hard he had tried – tried, fought, organised, argued and held on. There went out of Cairo and the Middle East that afternoon one of the great men of the war.’
At some point in his long army career, one of Auchinleck’s soldiers had christened him ‘the Auk’, and the name had stuck. He didn’t have Wavell’s reputation for brilliance, or his erudition. But he was not a complete stick in the mud. ‘Handsome and charming’ was the conclusion of one of Cairo’s young Englishwomen. Before the war he’d argued that the Indian army could have Indian, rather than British, officers. In military circles, this qualified him as a progressive.
Still, for Clarke, running what amounted to a private army in A Force, the change of commander was a perilous moment. Would the new man have the same enthusiasm for its unorthodox methods as his predecessor?
Auchinleck had seen his first action in Egypt during the previous war, so understood the challenges involved in fighting in the region. He had been warned that Churchill would want early results, but he refused to budge. Operation Battleaxe had shown that the British were outmatched in terms of equipment, training and tactics. There was no point wasting more lives and machinery simply to prove the point again.
This, of course, infuriated the impatient prime minister, but Churchill had outmanoeuvred himself. Having installed a new commander, he could hardly remove him. The Auk wanted time, and even if Churchill resented him for it, he would have to give it to him.
Churchill was only one of the people from whom Auchinleck wanted time and space. The other was Rommel. No one in Cairo was now under any illusions about the German commander’s abilities or his character. After the failure of Battleaxe, a counter-attack to take advantage of the Allied forces’ weakness was surely a possibility.
Wavell had spent five days handing over to Auchinleck, and may have helped to persuade his successor of the value of a deception operation, because the new commander summoned Clarke to ask what he could do to persuade the Germans to stay on the defensive. ‘He needed just four months of steady preparation, without serious enemy interference, to build up strength,’ Clarke wrote.
Auchinleck’s view was that the best way to achieve this would be to persuade Rommel that another British attempt to relieve Tobruk was imminent. Clarke set to work coming up with a story for a deception operation he codenamed ‘Collect’.
After his successful defence against Battleaxe, Rommel was indeed sure that with reinforcements, Egypt could be his. This was an astonishing position for a man who had landed in Africa less than five months earlier with orders to do nothing more than shore up his ally’s defences. But if Hitler was delighted by his general’s triumphs, he had his own reasons for not wanting to commit resources to the desert war. A week after the battle, Rommel found out why he wouldn’t be getting the extra troops he wanted.
The Costume Trunk July–October 1941
The Magician opens a large trunk to remove three trays, each with a different costume, and shows that the trunk is now empty. The audience selects one costume, which is placed back into the trunk. When the trunk is reopened, a lady steps out in the costume.
Chapter 14
At 4 a.m. on 22 June 1941, Germany declared war on the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa, involving millions of troops and thousands of tanks and planes, had begun.
The Germans had worked hard at their own deception operation ahead of this attack, spreading rumours that the troops massing in Eastern Europe were only there to prevent Britain from realising it was about to be invaded. The Luftwaffe had launched a 500-bomber raid against London in May, to give the impression that Berlin was still looking westward. But in the end the complete surprise the Germans achieved was down to one man: Josef Stalin. The Soviet leader had been warned that an invasion was imminent by his generals, by his spies, by his border guards and by the British. He refused to listen to any of them.
His soldiers, unprepared, ill-equipped and badly led, collapsed. Brigades, divisions, whole armies fell apart in front of the Wehrmacht advance. Though Churchill very much wanted the Soviets to stay in the fight, he held out little hope it would actually happen. For nearly two years, the Nazis had beaten every army they’d fought. There was no reason to think that Soviet soldiers, poorly trained, badly armed, under a commander who rejected realities he didn’t like, would do any better.
The impact on the war elsewhere wasn’t simply that Hitler had no tanks to spare. If, as both London and Berlin expected, Germany was swiftly victorious, Britain’s position in the Middle East would face a new threat. That summer, Hitler was looking at plans to send in troops through Turkey or, once he had advanced far enough into the Soviet Union, across the Caucasus.
From Cairo, watching the Germans advance apparently unopposed along the northern coast of the Black Sea, this looked very plausible. To Auchinleck it seemed almost a bigger threat than the much closer forces of Rommel. Wavell’s campaign in Lebanon and Syria had just come to a successful conclusion with the British in control of both countries. But now Auchinleck had to protect his northern flank, a thousand miles away from where his forces were currently facing the enemy. How was he supposed to do this when he didn’t have the strength to beat the Germans on one front? The immediate priority was to make these borders look better defended than they were. Clarke settled on a story that Canadian tank units were in the desert in Syria, heading north to protect this front. Canadian currency and armoured car badges appeared in towns along the route that they were supposed to have taken. The French police in Lebanon were suspected of still being loyal to Vichy, which made them a possible route of information to Axis intelligence. They were told that a French-Canadian soldier from a tank unit had deserted.
The only problem with this plan came when the police replied that they’d captured the man. Trying to conceal his surprise, Clarke sent an escort to collect him, and discovered that he was a Belgian-born trooper from a British tank unit who had been left behind in Greece and had managed to make his way through Turkey by pretending to be a French reservist. ‘Poor man,’ Clarke said. ‘We did the best we could for him, but were quite unable to explain the reasons for his inhospitable reception at the end of a truly gallant escape.’
Back with the story of ‘Collect’, the invasion of the Soviet Union gave Clarke a plausible narrative. Churchill was under strong domestic pressure to do something to help his new ally. Clarke wove that truth into the tale he wanted to tell Rommel. ‘The War Cabinet are anxious to hit Germany as hard as possible while she is heavily involved in Russia,’ he wrote, adding that they’d asked the Auk ‘to start offensive action at the earliest possible date’.
The date Clarke set for his fake assault was 9 August. ‘Please take all possible steps to have it rumoured by Service personnel,’ Clarke told Maunsell. A series of specific clues were dropped: two senior officers booked hotel rooms in Palestine for early August and then sent unencrypted telegrams cancelling them; three trusted officers were told that if they wanted to get out of any social engagements in the coming weeks, they should explain that they were expecting to be sent ‘up the line’ to the front; officers on leave from the Western Desert were asked to say that they expected to be recalled. To encourage some anxiety about the German rear, Clarke sent a cable to the British consul in Tangier requesting he locate a British sailor who was supposed to be in hospital there and ‘urgently’ ask him specific questions about the defences of Tripoli’s harbour.
Then, a week before the supposed date of the attack, it was ‘stood down’ and the word put about that it had been delayed by three weeks. This was at least partially successful. At the end of the month Rommel wrote to his wife that there was ‘a lot of blather about an imminent attack by the British’. Although he personally was unconvinced. ‘It’s probably pure gossip. They’re scraping together troops for Iran.’
That comment showed both Clarke’s growing success as a deceiver – he’d got his story in front of the enemy commander – but also the limits of what was possible. Rommel wasn’t going to believe the Allies were going to do something if he didn’t think that they had the troops to do it.
The second August attack was also ‘delayed’, with rumours now pointing to 15 September. ‘We hoped to keep him on the defensive all through the Autumn,’ Clarke wrote. ‘What was more, we hoped also that by crying wolf several times in succession, we might lull him into a sense of apathy and false security.’
Once again, there was a parallel from the world of stage magic. For an illusionist, misdirection isn’t just about where the audience is looking. It’s also about when. By tensing their muscles and adding an edge to their voice, an illusionist conveys the idea that something important is happening, and then when they relax or tell a joke, they send a signal to the audience that they too can let their attention slip a little. A spoon-bender might make several ‘failed’ attempts before, as the audience looks elsewhere, they do the trick by simply bending the spoon with their hands.
On a Saturday night in the middle of August, Clarke was summoned before the Auk to discuss Operation Collect. The general had orders for its next phase. The timing was tight, as Clarke was leaving town early the following morning, but he had always functioned best after dark, getting ‘a new lease of life after midnight’. In Palestine before the war, a colleague had noted that he and Clarke got on ‘splendidly’, because ‘I work all day, and he works all night.’ He liked to sit in late showings at cinemas, turning over problems in his mind or with a colleague. His staff in A Force didn’t record their feelings about being summoned to late meetings at whichever nightspot their commander happened to be occupying while doing his thinking.
The following day, having worked out the next stage of ‘Collect’ and issued his midnight orders, Clarke boarded an Imperial Airways flying boat to Khartoum. After spending five days flying across Africa and then up its west coast, his plane landed on the mouth of the River Tagus at Lisbon. He was travelling, as he had been in Istanbul, incognito, claiming to be a journalist. His plan was to repeat his Turkish success in another neutral country, Portugal.
Lisbon was an obvious spot for Clarke to ply his trade. The city had become a transit hub, and that made it the ideal base for spies – ‘more prolific even than Istanbul’, Clarke observed. As an overnight stop on the route between the Middle East and Britain, it was, he said, a ‘valuable centre for the collection of information from careless or venal travellers.’ It was also one of the places from which Germany tried to infiltrate spies into the UK. By 1943, Germans made up a seventh of the city’s entire diplomatic corps. The only country with a larger delegation was Britain, responsible for nearly a quarter of the diplomats in Portugal.
One focus for German intelligence-gathering was transatlantic ships bringing supplies destined for Britain. Combining two of the world’s oldest professions, the Germans had developed a network of informers in the waterfront brothels who passed on details gathered from drunken sailors on shore leave.
Masquerading as a journalist, Clarke haunted bars and hotels, noting who went where, and to whom they spoke. He had been briefed on which Germans were believed to be spies, and which Portuguese were seen as Nazi sympathisers. For his part, he played the gossipy hack, revealing that the British expected to renew their assault on Rommel in mid-September, and signalling that he might be willing to pass on more information in the right circumstances. ‘They were a colourful set,’ he said of the people he’d met. ‘Germans, Portuguese, Spaniards, international Americans, French and Swiss, of both sexes and mostly of doubtful occupation.’
Clarke was clearly having fun. One of his maxims was that ‘no new experience or pleasure should be lightly passed by while they were still there to be enjoyed.’ Lisbon, he was appreciating, was a very nice place to pass the war, or just to take a break from it.
For all the skill with which A Force was beginning to supply puzzle pieces for enemy intelligence to assemble, there were huge advantages sometimes to just telling your target the picture that they ought to be looking for. In the three months since Clarke left Turkey, his ‘channels’ in Istanbul had become his ‘main instrument for getting false information quickly to the enemy’. The possibility that Germany might invade Turkey meant he was keen to open up an alternative route.
After a month in Lisbon, Clarke felt he had done well, establishing no fewer than sixteen routes for passing information to the enemy. He had also set up a communication plan with MI6 there. As ever, a message would contain a codename – in this case it was ‘for Jack from Mayhew’ – and then the request to ‘counter’ – meaning ‘encourage’ – a particular line.
Clarke divided the information he wanted to pass over between ‘rumours’ and the more serious ‘leakages’. A rumour would ‘give away nothing vital’ – for instance that armoured troops in the Middle East were rearming. A leakage, on the other hand was ‘intended to deceive the enemy’s General Staff’. This would generally be more specific intelligence, apparently more useful – that a shipment of medium tanks was due to arrive at Suez the following week. With a leakage, Clarke said, ‘it is more important to conceal its source of origin than to ensure its transmission’. If a leakage was recognised as being planted by the British, he warned, it risked revealing the real plan.
For leakages, Clarke proposed that A Force would prepare fake documents that would be sent by air to Lisbon, where they could be dropped in spots including the toilet of the Atlantico Hotel, a favourite haunt of Germans in the city, or the Deck Bar in the seaside resort of Estoril.
For rumours, he drew up a list of people he believed to be in contact with the man identified by the British as the chief German agent. How good the list was is debatable. High up on it was a leading Portuguese banker and a man that many in British intelligence believed to be in league with the Axis.
It wasn’t hard to see why the spies thought this. The man dined regularly with the German ambassador, and his bank did a lot of business with the Axis powers. But another view was that he was simply a networker. He knew everyone, not just Germans. And his wife was Jewish, making him an unlikely Nazi. His abiding interest, not unusually in his line of work, seems to have been making money. That may have left him morally compromised, but it is a long way from being an Axis source.
