The illusionist, p.12
The Illusionist, page 12
Other people on Clarke’s list included a man who haunted the Deck Bar at lunchtime and in the evenings, earwigging conversations; the Lisbon correspondent of the Daily Express – ‘he is always short of copy, and is certain to give any juicy rumour a fair wind’; and a woman whom Clarke ungallantly described as the ‘parrot-nosed one in Parque Hotel’, who was ‘in constant touch with Germans’.
But the most amazing channel that Clarke proposed using to pass leakages to the Germans was at the top of his list, headlined ‘Letter Box 563’. A Force, Clarke said, would draft messages for this channel, which the MI6 station in Lisbon was to copy out in block capitals, sign ‘BOX 563’ and put in a letter. It should then be sent to none other than the military attaché at the German embassy.
Clarke’s records are frustratingly vague on his Lisbon trip, and offer no further details on this channel. He was clearly confident anything he sent would be believed: he planned to use this link for ‘leakages’ – the type of false story that, if it were detected as such, risked compromising all his work.
Which leaves a fascinating – and unanswered – question: who did the German military attaché believe the trustworthy source ‘Box 563’ to be?
The most straightforward explanation is that Clarke, masquerading as a sympathetic journalist, had got himself recruited as a German spy, and agreed a means of communication. This would have been a very high-risk approach. If the Abwehr found out his real identity, then they would know that everything he was sending them was intended to mislead them. That would make Clarke a very useful source indeed, but not in the way he imagined.
There is, though, another possibility. In the years leading up to the war, Clarke had visited Germany several times, observing the country’s increased militarisation, but also making contacts. In April 1939 he had gone to Berlin on a working holiday and, through a friend who was a diplomat, met several officers in German military intelligence. ‘This was not without some profit,’ he wrote after the war, ‘for two at least were to cross my path again before very long on the other side of the fence.’
Clarke gave no further explanation for this cryptic remark, but we do know the identity of one of these Germans. Gerhard von Schwerin was a Prussian with whom Clarke had found a sort of kinship: they were almost the same age, and their careers had followed similar trajectories from teenage Great War volunteer to respected peacetime staff officer. In June 1939, Schwerin visited London. Ostensibly, he was there to take a look at Britain’s military. Keen to show Germany that war wasn’t a one-way bet, the War Office cooperated.
But Schwerin had a secret mission: he was there to urge the British government to abandon its policy of appeasement and confront Hitler. He hoped that a show of British strength might persuade his government to back down. Officials heard him out but he left unconvinced that anything would change. The German spent several evenings in Clarke’s flat that summer, talking late into the night about military life and politics. He was far from certain that his country would win any war, but told Clarke that whatever the outcome, ‘the aftermath will still be Communism’.I
By early 1941 Schwerin was very much on the other side of the fence, as one of Rommel’s commanders heading across the desert towards Cairo. By the end of the year he was on the Russian front. With the outbreak of war, Schwerin had left military intelligence behind him and, whatever his personal antipathy towards Hitler, there’s little evidence that he was involved in any active resistance to Naziism.
But Clarke was close to one German officer who had flirted with betraying the Fuhrer. Might he have known others? Is it plausible that the recipient of letters from Box 563 knew exactly who was sending them, and was happy to pass them on in an effort to deceive his own leadership?
Some members of A Force certainly believed that their chief had contacts with Abwehr officers who were working to undermine Hitler. It may well be that this simply reflects the awe in which those who worked for Clarke held him: a man of mystery who simply knew everyone. But it’s hard to know which is more improbable: that an undercover British officer persuaded German intelligence that he was their man, or that he had someone in German intelligence working for him.
Clarke’s Lisbon channels would be less successful than the ones he set up in Turkey. The local MI6 station had no one willing or able to take on Vladimir Wolfson’s role as a shepherd of misinformation, and as the war went on A Force tended to rely on Istanbul. It’s now impossible to be definitive about whether Box 563 was ever used. Many of A Force’s records were destroyed both during the war and afterwards. In the thousands of pages left after the war, I can find no sign of a message being sent.
But to have set up the system at all was a risk that seems uncharacteristic for Clarke, whose approach was usually so meticulous and careful, never trying to pass the whole story by one channel, never drawing attention to what he was doing. Perhaps he was finding his standard route of getting stories over to the enemy was simply too slow. Or perhaps the thrill of a month as a real-life Hannay had gone to his head.
I. Clarke later claimed that on the eve of war, he had found Schwerin’s visiting card on his doormat with the words ‘Auf wiedersehen’ written on the back. However he didn’t mention it in his diary at the time, which feels like an extraordinary omission.
Chapter 15
In Cairo, by September Auchinleck was preparing to attack. That meant A Force moving to a new phase of Operation Collect. So far the idea had been to keep the Germans on the hop by building up false warnings of a coming assault, only to stand them down. But now they wanted the enemy to relax, and think that no attack was imminent. How could they suddenly reverse their message? John Shearer, Auchinleck’s head of intelligence – like Clarke, an inheritance from Wavell – had an idea about that.
Shearer wanted to use Cheese. The codename that had been given to Renato Levi was now being applied to the imaginary wireless operator he’d told his handlers he’d installed in Cairo before he left. So far, little had been done with him. After Kenyon Jones’s first thrilling moment of contact in July, the signals sent by Cheese had been low level. The responses to his messages from his German handlers in Italy hadn’t been enormously encouraging, either: the replies had been poorly encoded, and often repeated questions that had already been answered. There was not much to suggest that the enemy viewed Cheese as an important asset. Still, in Cairo, they took a little encouragement from the slipshod nature of the communication. They’d heard nothing from Levi since his return to Italy. Perhaps, they told themselves, the carelessness was a sign that he was working the other end personally. It would certainly be in his character.
At first, their messages were composed with caution. A Force and SIME didn’t know what Levi was telling his handlers about the spy network he’d built up in Cairo, and they didn’t want to send anything that contradicted him. Their solution to this problem was to do some invention of their own. Cheese signalled that he’d developed a ‘good South African contact’. Because this was an invention at the Cairo end, they could do with him what they liked.
With Auchinleck’s attack approaching, this contact was built up. His name was ‘Piet’, the Germans were told, and he was a non-commissioned officer working in a secure job at Grey Pillars. He had a motive for treachery: he liked women, and was short of cash. The imaginary agent Cheese now had an imaginary sub-agent.
To cover the coming offensive, codenamed ‘Crusader’, Shearer wanted to put over a sophisticated story, and he didn’t see how he could hope that it would be communicated in the piecemeal way that Clarke had been working. It needed to be told directly to the enemy. Cheese offered a route to doing that. Shearer drew up a plan. Such was its secrecy that he didn’t commit it to paper, instead telling it to an officer who was on his way to London, and who dictated it on arrival.
What was particularly surprising about the story Shearer wanted to tell was that it involved revealing what A Force had been up to for the last couple of months. ‘The British purposely spread rumours that they intended to attack on the above dates because they were themselves apprehensive of being attacked by the Germans,’ Shearer wrote in an outline of the tale he aimed to transmit. ‘After their abortive offensive in June, they realised that the Germans were considerably superior in tanks, both in respect of numbers and performance.’ This all had the benefit of being true, as everyone in Cairo was painfully aware. ‘The British therefore put out the rumours that they were about to attack, to cover their own weakness.’
Rommel would be told that the real preparations now underway for ‘Crusader’ were simply more efforts to dissuade him from attacking. As Clarke had done, Shearer wove things that the enemy would have observed into his narrative. There were the dummy tanks of the 38th Royal Tank Regiment, destroyed that month as the Germans advanced, which showed the British had been playing tricks. Then there was the ongoing removal of exhausted Australian troops from Tobruk and their replacement with Poles. ‘The plan is that the Poles should cover the evacuation, and should then be left to their fate,’ Shearer said. ‘Owing to the well-known reputation of the British for fair play, it is believed that Rommel would not credit such a dastardly plan.’
To Clarke, it felt a little too clever. ‘Ingenious,’ he concluded, ‘but not an easy plan to implement’. He did not, as a rule, approve of magicians revealing their secrets.
Whatever private misgivings Clarke had about Shearer’s plan, he was in no position to do anything about them. After a month in Lisbon, he received orders to go to London. His activities in Cairo had been watched with increasing interest, and now the top brass wanted to hear about them.
When Clarke had left the city ten months earlier, it had been in the midst of the Blitz, so he had some idea of what would greet him. In May he had received a telegram from home: ‘Regret your flat completely destroyed’. But knowing about something isn’t the same as seeing it. He mournfully approached the street in Mayfair that he’d called home. All that was left of the flat he loved, he wrote, was ‘a dusty heap of brickwork’.
Meanwhile his Commandos were still viewed as unproven. They had carried out a successful raid, on Norway’s Lofoten Islands, blowing things up and capturing prisoners and codebooks, but Clarke’s original vision of constant ‘butcher and bolt’ raids had not materialised.
But if these were causes of grief and frustration, most of his visit was a pleasure. To soldiers kicking their heels while they waited to get into the war, he was that treasured thing: a visitor back from where the action was. People wanted to hear his impressions of the desert war and of the apparently unbeatable Rommel.
More than that, he was a man with an idea to sell. To the War Office in London, the idea of actively pushing false stories in order to lead your enemy into making mistakes was a new one. Clarke had a gospel to proclaim, and he set about it with enthusiasm.
On a warm, cloudy Monday at the end of September, just over a week after he’d arrived in England, Clarke made his way up St James’s Street, round the corner from the Ritz Hotel, to an apparently vacant building. Number 58 had a ‘To Let’ sign outside, but he went in anyway. This was the London headquarters of MI5, Britain’s security service, charged with protecting the country’s secrets from Nazi spies.
He was there to see MI5’s military liaison, but after that meeting, he was taken to meet Guy Liddell, the deputy director. Clarke’s account of his work in the Middle East had a relevance to the spycatchers of St James that he couldn’t have appreciated.
Cheese, Clarke learned, was very far from the only double agent working for British intelligence in 1941. Right from the start of the war, MI5 had been capturing German spies and using them against their controllers. Some, like Renato Levi, had volunteered for this, turning themselves over to British intelligence before they’d even been caught. Others had accepted switching sides as the only sensible course after capture.
Success had bred success, thanks to the Abwehr’s unfortunate habit of telling its agents about each other so that they could work together. There was now an entire organisation of MI5 officers running spies that the Abwehr still believed to be loyal, overseen by the ‘Twenty Committee’, which took its name from a Latin pun – its business was to double-cross: ‘XX’.
But although it was building an impressive force of double agents, MI5 had so far only deployed them to catch other spies. People talked about the idea that they could pass false information back, of course, but no one could agree what it should be, or to what end. Now Clarke had turned up on their doorstep, with some very clear thoughts on the subject.
Where Clarke was outgoing, Liddell was softly spoken to the point of shyness. He was a thoughtful spycatcher whose character is captured in the codename given to his Top Secret diaries: ‘Wallflower’. These reveal a wry outlook on the world, a man wrestling to balance the need to keep the country safe with the desire to have a country worth saving.
He was impressed with Clarke, though. ‘I said that if we had a really good liaison and knew more about his schemes we could probably give him considerable help,’ he recorded. He quizzed Clarke about the practical arrangements, both in terms of putting over stories and deciding which tales to tell in the first place. Liddell was impressed, and even a little jealous. To his mind it confirmed what he’d been telling his bosses, ‘namely that they had a machine but they did not make proper use of it’.
A couple of days later, Liddell went to lunch with the chief of MI6, Stewart Menzies, famously known as ‘C’. His mind was still on what Clarke had told him. ‘We discussed in general terms the extent to which we could probably assist Egypt in their schemes of deception,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘Stewart was quite sure this could and should be done.’ Menzies even proposed bringing in MI6’s office in New York, which was running covert propaganda efforts to stir up Americans against Germany. One of its techniques was the planting of false news stories in US papers. Clarke’s work was very much in this line.
That Thursday Clarke appeared as guest of honour at two separate very secret meetings. In the morning he descended the stairs into the War Cabinet bunker, deep under Whitehall, to brief a meeting of intelligence chiefs – including Menzies – and planners about his work and ideas. Then, after lunch, he made his way across St James’s Park and back to MI5, where he had been invited to a meeting of the Twenty Committee.
These had been taking place weekly since the start of the year. Attendance was good thanks partly to the organisers’ efforts to ensure that, however bad rationing got, there were always currant buns available. Clarke, fresh from Cairo and Lisbon, may not have appreciated how precious these were.
The committee’s job was to coordinate Britain’s double agent work. A large part of that was reconciling the need to keep secrets with the requirement that the spies Germany sent to Britain should have something to report.
Anyone running a double agent faces this problem. If the agent is to be valued by the people who think they’re in control, then they need to send back good information. But what is it safe for the enemy to know? With many double agents in play, the problem was multiplied: their reports should neither contradict each other nor look coordinated. They should seem valuable without imparting anything of real value.
It didn’t help that the instinct of the authorities was often that the enemy should be told as little as possible. But the bigger problem was that no one could agree how these double agents should be used. The military, asked for deceptive ideas that could be passed over, generally had few suggestions beyond putting over the idea that morale was high and troops were well-equipped.
For Clarke, who was used to drawing up and executing plans swiftly on the authority of his commander, this bureaucracy was a jarring change of pace.
The committee was anxious to hear of his experiences with German intelligence. Much of their war felt a little theoretical, a game of chess against a distant enemy. Here was someone whose suntan testified to his practical experience. Clarke, always happy to have an audience, held forth. German intelligence was, he explained, best on things its forces were in direct contact with. The enemy’s knowledge of what was going on further away was poor. They talked about how London could help Cairo, and T. A. ‘TAR’ Robertson, who ran MI5’s double agents section, invited him to come back the next day for a more detailed discussion.
Liddell joined that chat too. He was supportive in principle of the idea of using agents in Britain to pass deception to Germany, but cautioned Clarke that he saw the double-cross network as a long-term operation. Any ‘downright lying’, he said, risked revealing that agents had been turned. That, of course, was precisely what Shearer was preparing to do in Cairo with Cheese. Liddell, with more double agents under his control, was handling them with more care. The most he would allow was for them to send their German controllers ‘tentative half-truths’.
Clarke now turned his attention to a bigger target. Getting the support of spies was all very well, but if deception was going to work, it would need the support of the military. He had set out his thoughts in a ‘Most Secret’ paper that he had circulated at the highest levels of the War Office.
After nearly a year as a deceiver, having seen both successes and failures, Clarke here wrote down for the first time his vision for the work. What he was talking about, he explained, was far more than mere propaganda – misleading information that might lower enemy morale. It was actually possible to sell false stories to the enemy commanders. What was more, this was a goal worth taking time over. Senior officers, he said, ‘must be prepared to go to endless inconvenience and even serious risks’ for the prize of ‘strategic surprise through deliberate deception’.
