The illusionist, p.13
The Illusionist, page 13
MI5’s agents weren’t being used properly, he said – Liddell, frustrated at the lack of military cooperation with the Twenty Committee, may well have encouraged him to make this point – and the information they were passing was too sparse, and of too low a quality. Only if they gave better material would they be able to win the Abwehr’s confidence in the way that they would need to if they were to start spinning lies.
But this wasn’t enough. Like a good magician, Clarke knew that he needed to show things to the audience, as well as tell them. ‘ “Oral” sources of information will never sustain a deception unless some “visual” support is produced to confirm it,’ he wrote. ‘The degree of success of the deception will usually depend upon the scale on which visible evidence is provided to support the whispered story.’ That would mean dummy units, at the very least.
All of these pieces need to work together. ‘The complete picture must never be presented through any one source: the enemy must be left to build up a jigsaw puzzle himself,’ he wrote. ‘The pieces, consisting of rumours, leakages and visual evidence, must be supplied to him through varying sources.’
One of Clarke’s staff explained this to a colleague a little more colloquially: ‘Never give the Boche the thing on a plate – give him the little bits and let him piece them together and think he has been clever.’
That was the means, then, but what was Clarke’s goal? It was breathtaking in its ambition. ‘All lies, however big, must themselves form pieces in one grand jigsaw puzzle,’ he concluded. ‘The basis of all future deception should be a completely bogus plan for winning the war.’
Deception was as old as warfare, but what Clarke was describing was something quite new. It was not simply a question of whether an attack was going to come on the left flank or the right, but whether it was going to come in Norway or France, through Italy or the Balkans. This had never been a possibility before because war had never been fought on such a scale before. Clarke had grasped that the global nature of the war made deception a more powerful weapon than ever. Soldiers in the wrong trench can move when an attack comes elsewhere. Armies in the wrong country are useless. And if they can be kept in the wrong place long enough, it might even be possible to defeat them without having to kill them.
It was a message his audience was ready to hear. Hitler’s forces were pushing hard into Russia, apparently on course to repeat their triumphs in Western Europe of the previous year. Rommel had shown what the German army was capable of in Africa. Britain felt weak in comparison. As the Joint Intelligence Staff pointed out in their own paper supporting Clarke’s arguments, ‘we, unlike the Germans, have not the troops, shipping or the interior lines necessary to give threats the backing of reality’. Deception could make them look stronger than they were.
Chapter 16
The following week Clarke was summoned to address the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Britain’s highest military decision-making body. The three men in charge of the fighting services met each morning at half past ten in a grand room on the second floor of a vast government building overlooking St James’s Park. Clarke made his way through a great pair of bronze doors guarded by armed sentries, past the machine-gun post that protected the route up to the prime minister’s private apartment – Downing Street had been deemed insufficiently bomb-proof – and up the wide staircase that was designed to impress upon the visitor that they were in the governing halls of the world’s greatest imperial power.
Outside the room where the chiefs met was a hat-stand bearing their caps and a small collection of senior officers, waiting for their turn to be called in. Clarke was second on the agenda.
To a lieutenant colonel less self-confident, this might have been a daunting prospect, but it’s unlikely to have troubled Clarke much. Apart from anything else, he counted two of the three chiefs as allies: his old commander, John Dill, and Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal, who’d served alongside Clarke in the Middle East before the war. The only moment in the meeting when he found himself lost for words was when, as the other chiefs asked questions, Dill passed Clarke a note inviting him to his wedding the next day.
Step by step, Clarke took the room through his experiences and his ideas for taking deception to a new level, and added another point: deception-planning should ultimately be in the hands of a single man.
Two days and one wedding later, he returned to the committee to hear its verdict. They were persuaded of his case. Two years into the war, they knew they needed all the good ideas they could get. The only real question was who should take charge of deception in London. The intelligence chiefs had written a description of the ideal candidate: ‘must possess considerable ingenuity and imagination, an aptitude for improvisation, plenty of initiative, be something of an actor, in addition to having a sound military background’.
It wasn’t a very subtle hint about who they backed for the role, and Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, acted on it. He asked Clarke whether he would be willing to take on the job.
It must have been tempting: after leaving London under a bit of a cloud the previous year, he would be returning in triumph, to a job right in the heart of the war-planning operation, on what was surely a fast track to promotion. He would have a global remit, and when the moment came, he would oversee the deception operations for the Allies’ return to the continent.
Which is why it was so surprising to the committee that Clarke refused. The reason he gave was that he was working for Auchinleck, ‘who alone was conducting active operations at the time, and I felt sure my place was to stay with him’.
Was that the whole truth? There was of course Clarke’s love for the Middle East. He would also have been painfully aware of how the bureaucratic wrangling and frustration of the War Office compared to the free hand he enjoyed in Cairo. In London he would find himself wrestling with MI5, MI6 and the military establishment. In Egypt, where he worked well with Maunsell and had the support of his commander, he had only to think of a plan to put it into action.
Two weeks in Britain in the autumn might also have reinforced to Clarke how much better life was in Cairo, where there was no blackout or rationing. He liked fine food and drink and even at the Ritz, one of his favoured London hangouts, both were in short supply. Back in Cairo, he could spend his evenings dining and sipping cocktails in Shepheard’s, surrounded by admiring younger men like David Stirling and Tony Simonds, and holding forth on unconventional warfare.
Perhaps, too, he was aware that A Force was as close to a private army as he was likely to get. It was hardly likely that the person who got the London job would be allowed to spend weeks on end playing at spies in neutral capitals. And, as he said, Auchinleck was the only person fighting the enemy at that moment. In October 1941, the war was simply much more fun in Cairo than it was in London.
The chiefs must have looked a little put out at this. To placate them, Clarke tried an analogy aimed at the English upper classes. ‘You can’t pinch a man’s butler when he has only been lent to you for the night,’ he said, and at that they laughed, and agreed to let him return to Auchinleck.
The crucial point, as far as he was concerned, was that they’d agreed to his main proposal, the establishment of a ‘London Controlling Section’ – another deliberately vague name – reporting to them, to plan, implement and coordinate deception operations. Less than a year after setting out for Egypt, Clarke had designed a new weapon of war, and put it at the heart of British operations. He was riding high.
On Monday, 13 October, Clarke boarded a flight at Whitchurch airfield, outside Bristol, bound once again for Lisbon. Shearer’s message setting out the next phase of Collect had arrived while he’d been in London. In line with Liddell’s injunction that MI5’s Double-Cross network would transmit only half-truths, it was agreed that the only thing the Germans would learn from their European agents was that there was good reason to think there could be no Middle East offensive before Christmas.
One such reason was that the troops might be needed elsewhere. Part of the ‘Collect’ story was that the British were considering sending troops to the Caucasus, to help the defence of Russia. That, went the argument, would leave too few troops in Egypt to attack Rommel.
After three days in Lisbon, Clarke concluded that ‘the news of “no desert offensive before Christmas” was successfully percolated into the German embassy’. He didn’t record how he achieved that. Had he posted a letter from ‘Box 563’, or spoken to his ‘controller’ in person? He must have done more than simply talking loudly in a lot of bars.
There was another neutral country where he could try to get some channels going, and on Thursday, 16 October, Clarke left Lisbon for Madrid, with the goal of passing ‘confirmatory evidence’ to the German military attaché. And it was there, the following evening, that he was arrested.
This was a disaster. Spain may have been neutral, but its fascist government leaned firmly towards the Nazis. The Abwehr employed between seventy and a hundred people in Germany’s Madrid embassy. Clarke was a British officer travelling out of uniform, under a false cover – a spy, in fact. If he were captured on the battlefield, he would expect to be treated as a prisoner of war. But what rights or protections would he have now if the Germans decided they wanted to grab him and interrogate him?
There’s no question that bundling Clarke into a car, whisking him to Germany and then torturing him would have been a worthwhile exercise. Few people, if anyone, outside Britain knew as much as Clarke did about his country’s intelligence secrets. He had sat in on the committee that controlled MI5’s double agents. He hadn’t yet been formally informed that Bletchley Park, British intelligence’s code-breaking headquarters, had got into Germany’s ‘unbreakable’ Enigma, but as intelligence adviser to successive commanders-inchief in the Middle East, he may well have been aware that an unusually reliable source was providing incredible levels of information about Rommel’s supply lines and Axis shipping in the Mediterranean. He knew from things that had been said at the Twenty Committee that the Allies had ‘secret sources’ that were telling them things about the Abwehr’s thinking.
On a military level he knew the precise detail of British forces in the Middle East, and Auchinleck’s plans for them. He was responsible for MI9 escape lines in Greece, the Middle East and Africa. Barely a week earlier, he had been in the War Cabinet bunker. If someone could get Clarke to talk, he had an awful lot to say.
What made all of this far more complicated were the circumstances of his arrest. Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Wrangel Clarke, Royal Artillery, GSO 1 (Intelligence) at GHQ Middle East, Personal Intelligence Officer for Special Duties to the Commander-in-Chief, Officer Commanding A Force, founder of the Commandos, had been, in the words of an urgent cable sent to the Foreign Office in London, ‘arrested in a main street dressed, down to a brassiere, as a woman’.
Chapter 17
It hadn’t been an easy few months at the British embassy in Madrid. In some ways, things were going well. The diplomats were succeeding in their first, above-all-else goal of keeping Spain from joining the war on Hitler’s side. To this end, spies in the embassy were funnelling huge bribes to sympathetic generals. Probably more significant in this cause had been Wavell’s defeat of the Italians at the start of the year, a sign that the war wasn’t a one-way bet for a fascist leader. Unable to agree terms with Hitler, the dictator Francisco Franco was so far staying on the sidelines.
But behind the embassy walls there were tensions between the ambassador, Sir Samuel Hoare, and the spies there operating under diplomatic cover. Hoare had been an intelligence officer himself in the previous war, working in Russia and then in Rome, where his most famous recruit was a journalist who at the time supported fighting Germany: one Benito Mussolini. Hoare had paid the future dictator £100 a week to produce pro-war propaganda. It is possible that subsequent developments in Italy explained the ambassador’s cynicism about the value of intelligence operations. Or perhaps he simply felt MI6 was putting his careful work with the Spanish government at risk.
His suspicions had, to his mind, been confirmed that summer when MI6 discovered that one of their officers in the embassy, a Frenchman, had contacted the Vichy French government and ‘divulged many secrets’. The traitor was lured to the embassy, knocked out and sedated as part of a plan to spirit him out of the country. This went wrong when, as the car carrying him was passing through a village in southern Spain, he woke up and began shouting for help. Desperate to subdue him, his captors hit him on the head with a revolver, accidentally killing him. His body was disposed of, and his wife told he’d been drowned when the ship he was travelling on was sunk. German and Vichy diplomats, however, got hold of the truth, and complained to the Spanish Foreign Ministry. Radio France broadcast a report of the incident. ‘It could not have been a worse affair,’ Hoare sighed in a message back to the Foreign Office.
Clarke’s arrest came just as the embassy was putting out these fires. His crime seems to have been his outfit: a knee-length floral dress, high heels, stockings, a necklace, gloves to the elbow, and a tight turban to cover his military haircut. He had accessorised with a small handbag. It wasn’t unflattering, but it wasn’t especially convincing either. Clarke wasn’t a tall man – a shade under five foot eight – or particularly broad, but he was six inches taller than the average Spanish woman at the time, and his Adam’s apple was clearly visible. The turban didn’t entirely conceal his receding hairline, either.
In a way, it shouldn’t have been a diplomatic problem: Clarke was claiming to be a journalist, not a soldier or a government official, so even if he’d done something stupid, it was just another case of a Brit abroad getting themselves into trouble – a routine consular issue. But there was an uneasy sense that there was more to it. Composing a cable to London on the evening after Clarke was arrested, Arthur Yencken, the Counsellor at the embassy, tried to pull the facts together.
‘Dudley Clarke, “Times” war correspondent, arrived in Madrid on October 16th on his way to Egypt via Gibraltar,’ he began. Clarke had visited the embassy, where he told William Torr, the military attaché, ‘that he was also employed by the Joint Intelligence Bureau, Near East, and was under the War Office.’ They’d then been joined by Leonard Hamilton Stokes, the local MI6 head of station. Torr and Hamilton Stokes had been ‘particularly struck by his intimate knowledge of military secrets and plans of the Naval Intelligence, Middle East.’
After Clarke’s arrest, one of the embassy staff had managed to get hold of the interpreter who had helped the police interrogate him. He said the Englishman had claimed to be a novelist who ‘wanted to study the reactions of men to women in the street’. The police view apparently was that this was ‘a homosexual affair’, and their inclination was to fine Clarke and let him go.
Clarke told a different story to the British consul who visited him in custody that morning, that ‘he was taking the feminine garments to a lady in Gibraltar and thought that he would try them on for a prank.’ However, Yencken observed acidly, ‘this hardly squares with the fact that the garments and shoes fitted him.’ The diplomat was clearly thinking along similar lines to the police.
The problem was the enemy. ‘The Germans apparently think that they have got on to a first class espionage incident and will certainly make the most of it.’ The police had searched Clarke’s luggage, and found ‘another complete set of women’s clothes, a war correspondent’s uniform and a note book with a number of names of people in London in it. Also papers and a roll of super-fine toilet paper.’ The last item had ‘particularly excited the police who are submitting each sheet to chemical tests’, confirming they were considering the possibility that Clarke was a spy.
If the perplexed Yencken was unaware of Clarke’s importance, it was hardly his fault that his clandestine colleagues chose to keep him in the dark. Hamilton Stokes knew exactly who Clarke was and what he was supposed to be doing in Madrid. But as Clarke was sticking to his cover story with the police, the spies followed his lead in the embassy. The most surprising thing was that they told Yencken anything at all. Probably, as Clarke was known to have met them both at the embassy, they judged that a complete denial of knowledge was implausible.
Yencken’s Saturday night cable to Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent secretary of the Foreign Office, was prompted not by security fears, but concern about an embarrassing scandal involving a correspondent from a leading newspaper. ‘I need hardly point out the damage this incident will do to us and the “Times” here,’ Yencken wrote. ‘Jokes have already begun about “the editor” of the “Times” masquerading as a woman.’
In London they couldn’t have cared less about jokes, or indeed the reputation of The Times. Hamilton Stokes was having his own cable exchange with his boss, Sir Stewart Menzies. In reply to anxious messages from Menzies about what secrets Clarke might reveal, the station chief replied that the police remained of the view that the unusually-dressed Englishman was a ‘homosexualist’ but that the Gestapo was pushing the line that he was a spy.
If Cadogan wasn’t aware of Clarke’s identity, Menzies must then have told him, because that Sunday saw a flurry of activity in Whitehall. Cadogan sent the telegram on to Philip Whitefoord, the Deputy Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office. And at this point, the military showed that it still knew how to form square around an endangered colleague. Whatever trouble Clarke might have got himself into, he was a well-liked and well-connected officer. Whitefoord and his bosses told the Foreign Office that the most important thing was that, once released, their man should be got over the border either to Gibraltar or Portugal, and then allowed to carry on to Cairo.
‘He has verbal information for General Auchinleck which no one else can give at the moment,’ Whitefoord said. The Auk would also be able to deal with ‘the disciplinary side of the affair,’ he said. ‘Clarke is on his staff.’ The spooks and the diplomats, in other words, could do their job and get Clarke out of jail, and then they could get their mitts off him. In Cairo, Auchinleck weighed in, demanding Clarke be sent back to him ‘as soon as possible’.
