The illusionist, p.14
The Illusionist, page 14
Cadogan pushed back, insisting that whoever was going to receive Clarke in Lisbon or Gibraltar be told the circumstances of the arrest ‘so that they may all know that they may have a lunatic to deal with’. That seemed to persuade the War Office.
‘Clarke arrested Madrid disguised as a woman,’ Whitefoord’s cable to Gibraltar began. ‘We hope fact that he is a British officer may be unknown to Spanish authorities and must be kept secret. Please keep him under strict surveillance and despatch to Middle East by next plane. If he shows signs of mental derangement he should however be sent home by first ship.’
Cadogan, meanwhile, cabled Madrid. ‘If Clarke is released, you should get him to Gibraltar by quickest means,’ he began. ‘It would be well that he should be accompanied by someone responsible. You should ascertain from Clarke nature of his papers which Spanish authorities may have examined and whether documents might compromise anything.’
He closed with a warning that should have impressed upon the diplomats the seriousness of the matter: ‘In no circumstances should it be revealed that C. is a British officer.’
Amid the flurry that his arrest had caused in both Madrid and London the man himself seemed strangely untroubled. The consul who visited him under arrest found him ‘calm and unconcerned’. Clarke’s ability to stay cool under pressure was one of the things Wavell liked about him. A Force staff appreciated it too. ‘Everything was always funny,’ one of his officers said. ‘This extraordinary quality not only made employment in A Force a joy; it had an extremely practical value since it took the drama out of nail-biting operations.’ But sitting in a Spanish cell must have been a test of even Clarke’s sangfroid. This had the potential to go very badly.
It was not until the Tuesday evening that Yencken cabled back to Cadogan: ‘Mr Clarke was released last night and ordered to leave Spain within 48 hours. He is leaving tonight for Gibraltar accompanied by His Majesty’s Consul. Police authorities have returned all Mr Clarke’s papers which, according to him, are without exception personal, private and entirely uncompromising.’
From Yencken’s point of view, it was a happy ending, although someone did indeed leak the story. MI6 intercepted a report from Madrid to Berlin about the arrest of ‘Wrangal Craker, the Madrid correspondent of the London “Times”’ – the Spanish police don’t seem to have established Clarke’s real name. It said that, perhaps as a result of the ‘unusual circumstances of these times’ and the ‘working methods of British agents’, he had been ‘dressed as a woman’, although he had ‘unusually big feet with a remarkable…’ at which point the message was, sadly, marked ‘undecipherable’.
After sending his telegram, Yencken slipped a couple of photographs into an envelope and addressed them, ‘Personal and Secret’ to Cadogan. ‘Dear Alec,’ he began. ‘I enclose two photographs which the Spanish police took of Dudley Clarke after his arrest.’
The first showed Clarke wearing the outfit in which he’d been arrested. The second showed him back in a pinstripe suit, with bow tie and pocket handkerchief. Intriguingly, both had the air of slightly awkward studio portraits, rather than shame-faced police mugshots. More pictures were doing the rounds: Clarke had posed both sitting and standing. Given the circumstances, he didn’t look all that perturbed.
When they arrived a week later, Cadogan put them back into the envelope with a note to send them on to Menzies: ‘C might like to see.’
The views of C on this aren’t in the public domain, but over at MI5 Guy Liddell, who a few days earlier had been so impressed by Clarke, was now revising his opinion, expressing the view of the professional spy about the amateur. ‘I am afraid that after his stay in Lisbon as a bogus journalist he has got rather over-confident about his powers,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘It would be much better if these people confined themselves to their proper job.’
A couple of weeks later, Liddell had heard the full story, including the circumstances of Clarke’s arrest. ‘At the time he was dressed as a woman complete with brassiere etc,’ he said. ‘Why he wore this disguise nobody quite knows.’
Having escaped the clutches of the Spanish police and got beyond the reach of German intelligence, Clarke still had to account for himself to his own side. The hopes of Whitefoord and others that he might swiftly be sent on to Cairo, and the whole matter brushed under the carpet, were dashed before he even got out of jail.
On Monday, 20 October, Cadogan had held an emergency meeting on Clarke’s arrest. Any doubt about how seriously this was being taken can be dispelled by looking at who was present: Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary; David Margesson, the War Secretary; John Dill, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister. These were the men who were running the war.
Dill was always going to defend his protégé. But the situation facing Clarke was serious. When Cadogan had suggested Clarke might be a ‘lunatic’, it could have been interpreted as a charitable interpretation. He wouldn’t have been the first soldier to have cracked under the pressure of war, and there were, from a military point of view, worse explanations. In the thinking in 1941, in Britain as much as in Spain, men wearing women’s clothing was linked to homosexuality – which was, officially at least, banned from the military.
The reality was a little more complicated. The King’s Regulations stated that ‘confirmed homosexuals whose rehabilitation is unlikely should be removed from the Army by the most expeditious and appropriate means’. But in fact senior soldiers were often tolerant. They were too short of fighting men to start turning any away. Many had served in India, where attitudes were different from England. In Cairo, Shepheard’s Hotel – where Clarke lived – was known to be a meeting place for gay officers, and the Royal Military Police made no effort to interfere.
As for Maunsell, in charge of security in Cairo, he couldn’t have cared less. Every so often, someone would approach him awkwardly to inform him, in tones of hushed embarrassment, that a member of SIME staff was having an affair with another man. Maunsell, who reckoned this was true of about four of his officers over the course of the war, found people’s concerns about his men ridiculous: ‘They all behaved in a perfectly civilised way and I had no reason to believe their proclivities interfered with or threatened their work.’
The attitude of Dill, therefore, would probably not so much have been that Clarke wasn’t gay as that it didn’t greatly matter if he was. The difficulty was that he had been caught up in a scandal. Worse, whatever the truth about his attire, he had put himself, and everything he knew, at risk. Churchill was firm. If Clarke was released, he must be sent back to Britain.
So it was that on Wednesday, 22 October, nine days after he had departed Britain in triumph, Clarke boarded a merchant ship travelling from Gibraltar to Liverpool, returning home in disgrace.
Chapter 18
But fortune, in a very strange way, was smiling on Clarke. The German navy was about to save his career. It would do it by trying to drown him.
Clarke was travelling on the merchant steamer Ariosto, part of convoy HG-75, which was largely carrying iron ore. The Ariosto had done this route several times before, and its luck had run out.
Trailing the convoy was Wolfpack Breslau, a group of six U-boats coming to the end of a month-long patrol that had taken them out into the middle of the Atlantic and now down to the coast of Spain. They had been waiting there almost a week for a chance like this.
Just after midnight on the Thursday night, one of the U-boats fired three torpedoes, hitting an escort vessel, HMS Cossack. Much of the forward section of the ship was destroyed, and she caught fire. The convoy steamed on. Six hours later, a second U-boat fired five torpedoes. The first three exploded in columns of fire ten seconds apart from each other. The other two were heard to hit three minutes later. The Ariosto was one of three merchantmen holed. Six of the crew were killed, but Clarke, along with 44 other survivors, made it onto a lifeboat. His week was not, on the face of it, going well.
Most of the passengers were picked up by another merchantman in the convoy, but Clarke was rescued by HMS Lamerton, a destroyer. And here came an extraordinary moment of good chance. The next day a British plane spotted an Italian submarine and bombed it, preventing it from submerging. Lamerton was ordered to finish the submarine off, which she did after a long gun battle. But now low on fuel, Lamerton turned back to Gibraltar.
Which was why on Thursday, 30 October, just over a week after he had put to sea, Clarke cabled Dill to say that he was back in Gibraltar and ask whether he should still try to come back to the UK. The chief of staff saw his moment. ‘Clarke has been delayed by about a week by this mischance, and as sailings from Gibraltar are irregular, there may still be further delay,’ Dill wrote to Churchill. Meanwhile Clarke was ‘urgently required’ in Cairo.
Wouldn’t it be better, Dill suggested, to have Clarke questioned on Gibraltar and, if his story seemed ‘reasonable’ and he was ‘sound in mind and body’, send him on his way? The release of Clarke by the Spanish police, the lack of further incident and the passage of time had done their work. Churchill consented.
The man who would decide Clarke’s future was Lord Gort, the governor-general and commander-in-chief of Gibraltar. He’d had an outstanding record in the Great War, culminating in a Victoria Cross for an action in which he’d crossed open ground under fire, while wounded, to lead a tank in support of his battalion. Promoted between the wars to Chief of the Imperial General Staff, his weaknesses as a general had been exposed in France, and like many of Britain’s other failed commanders, he’d been shunted off out of the country. There was not much love lost between Gort and Dill, but like Clarke, the governor-general was an army lifer.
Clarke’s defence was, according to cables sent to MI6, that the ‘incident in Madrid was carefully calculated’ and ‘nothing (repeat nothing) whatever compromised’. Whether Gort believed that or not, he clearly agreed that Clarke’s fitness to serve was a matter for Auchinleck, not the Foreign Office or indeed the prime minister. A Force’s cross-dressing leader was told he could proceed to Cairo.
It would be nearly a month before Gort’s report arrived in London. It was, Dill told Churchill, ‘of such length that you certainly should not be bothered to read it’. That may have been the intention. Clarke, Dill told the prime minister, ‘showed no signs of insanity but undertook a foolhardy and misjudged action with a definite purpose, for which he had rehearsed his art beforehand.’ The result was that ‘he gravely risked undoing some of the excellent work already done in UK and en route there’. Gort had concluded the incident had given Clarke ‘sufficient shock to make him more prudent in the immediate future.’
Churchill, though, still had a question. ‘What was his purpose?’ he scrawled on the bottom of Dill’s note.
Eighty years later, the question remains. Not so much why Clarke went to Madrid – his explanation, that he wanted to build up channels for passing disinformation, seems plausible – but why he stepped out on a Friday night in a floral dress and heels.
Clarke’s friends always resisted the idea that the lifelong bachelor was anything other than a heterosexual man who had simply failed to meet the right girl. Products of their time, they felt that his character needed to be defended from suggestions to the contrary, and they pointed to the way he was always surrounded by beautiful women. There must have been some reasonable explanation for the Madrid escapade, they said, without ever suggesting one.
Clarke’s goddaughter didn’t know him well, but assumed he was bisexual. Her mother, who had worked with him during the war, described him as the kind of chap with whom a lady could enjoy an evening around town without worrying that he was going to try anything on the way home. And even the nickname Clarke’s friends gave the women around him, ‘Dudley’s duchesses’, carries a hint that his intentions towards them weren’t sexual.
It certainly seems that Clarke enjoyed dressing as a woman. At staff college a decade earlier, he had written the class pantomime, casting himself as ‘Volga Olga, quite the Worst Woman in the World’. Olga, described in the stage directions as ‘an exotic figure’, is a seductive spy who speaks in double-entendres and in the final act sneaks into a senior officer’s bedroom dressed as a maid. Clarke kept photographs and a sketch of himself in the role. On its own, that means nothing: lots of straight men have acted in drag, and it was certainly in character for Clarke to take a scene-stealing role that had the potential to bring the house down.
But Clarke’s own attitude to his arrest suggested he viewed it as a scandal, rather than a cunning ruse. When he came to record the activities of A Force, he was generally happy to discuss failures and mistakes, especially if they had a funny side. But he wrote almost nothing about his Spanish trip. His report of the ‘Collect’ disinformation campaign says that he tried to put the story that there would be no desert offensive before Christmas over to the German military attaché in Madrid, ‘but this had to be abandoned’. It was not a week he wished to record for posterity. The angry defensiveness of his friends likewise suggests they knew this wasn’t really a caper that had backfired.
So there was probably truth in what many people in London clearly believed: Clarke was a cross-dresser who, coming off the high of his triumphant trip to London, had been tempted to indulge in a secret pleasure in a city where no one knew him.
But that may not have been the whole truth. As ever with Clarke, there are other intriguing possibilities.
According to Dill, Clarke had told Gort that his arrest had been part of a plan. He’d ‘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’. It would be understandable to dismiss this, but what if it were true?
First, there is the question of how Clarke managed to get out of prison. For all that Britain’s diplomats in Madrid were happy to take the credit, MI5’s Guy Liddell had a different explanation.
‘His speedy release can only be explained by the Germans having intervened on his behalf,’ Liddell told his diary. ‘It will be remembered that he made contact with a man he believed to be a German agent in Lisbon. This man was in Spain at the time and, believing Dudley Clarke to be an important agent who was ready to assist the Germans, intervened with the Spanish police.’
If this story is true, then it is quite a coincidence that a German who was willing and able to help Clarke out of trouble had travelled from Portugal to Spain at just the right moment to do so. Indeed, Clarke’s claim seemed to be that it wasn’t a coincidence at all: that the pair were in Madrid as part of his effort to secure his relationship with his German contact.
In Clarke’s narrative, this German believed Clarke – presumably under his cover as a British journalist – was a potential Abwehr source. And Clarke said his Madrid ‘disguise’ was part of building that relationship.
When he’d spoken to the Twenty Committee in London, Clarke had claimed that he’d created an ‘imaginary young woman in Lisbon’ who was ‘offering her services to the Germans’. Was this fictional woman in fact Clarke in a dress?
It’s unlikely that even a very gullible German spy would have believed Clarke to actually be a woman. The Spanish police certainly weren’t taken in. But that may not have been the intention. In both London and Berlin in the 1930s, there was a fair amount of cross-dressing at underground gatherings of gay men. Was this the point of kinship that Clarke had developed with his German contact? Had the two men travelled to a city where they were unknown in order to indulge in a little role-play? Is this why Clarke believed that letters from ‘Box 563’ would be accepted – because of a shared secret?
Clarke’s great-nieces and -nephew tell a story they heard from their grandfather, Clarke’s brother Thomas, that Great Uncle Dudley had been decorated by the Germans, who had believed he was working for the Nazis. It’s tempting to dismiss this as a family myth. Both brothers were, after all, well able to spin a yarn. Or it may be a garbled reference to an A Force double agent codenamed 'Axe' who was awarded the Iron Cross by controllers who believed him still to be loyal. Clarke certainly left no record of personally receiving such a medal, but he did keep some details of his activities out of his later accounts. The entire Madrid episode shows a man willing to keep his masters in the dark about risks he was taking. Might he have had a German contact that he kept off the books?
If that was the case, it raises again the question of whether the German agent did believe Clarke was working for him, or whether he knew that Clarke was passing disinformation and was willing to help. Was this one of the intelligence officers that Clarke had got to know during his 1939 holiday in Berlin? That had once been, like Cairo, a city famous for its permissiveness.
It all sounds far-fetched, but then so does a senior British officer getting arrested wearing a dress. Perhaps it is simpler: Clarke had got carried away with his previous adventures in espionage and, remembering his triumphant stage appearance, wanted to see if he could pull the disguise off for real. His explanations were simply fabrications to get himself out of trouble. It’s not like Clarke had a problem making things up. ‘It may be,’ Liddell said, ‘that he is just the type who imagines himself as the super secret agent.’
Churchill seems to have settled for the explanation Dill gave him. Perhaps the prime minister accepted that dressing as a woman was just the sort of thing a chap had to do if he wanted to get alongside a German. Perhaps he felt a little eccentricity was a price worth paying for a creative thinker who was clearly highly valued by his superiors.
Indeed, a private life that had to be kept hidden would offer insight into Clarke’s facility with concealment and false narratives. He had a couple of stories he would tell about women he had loved and lost, one a mysterious Russian fleeing the Bolsheviks, and the other an English girl who married a fellow officer. These tales might have been true, but if not they contained just the right amount of detail to be memorable without being verifiable.
