The illusionist, p.16
The Illusionist, page 16
Among the plundered documents was an Italian assessment of the defences of Cyprus. Clarke was delighted: ‘It is really the first chance we have had of discovering in any detail how much of the stuff we put across really achieves the desired effect.’ There was even a map, which showed the Italians estimated the British had two divisions on the island, one more than was really there.
A British intelligence officer in the headquarters on Cyprus was asked to compare the Italian assessment both to reality and to the deception story that had been put over. ‘It is difficult to regard this map as a completely serious document,’ he replied. Before the war this officer had been a schoolmaster, and it came across in his withering write-up. ‘It seems the sort of work which might be produced by a staff officer who, after filling in the little he knew to be true and exhausting what his common sense told him was, in the nature of things, probable, found the picture unconvincing and filled in further details at random.’
The German intelligence analysis also offered insights into the audience for whom A Force was putting on its show. For a start, a close reading revealed the occasional strange gap in German knowledge. Noting that, at the beginning of November, Alan Brooke had replaced John Dill as Chief of the General Staff, one document went on: ‘Reliable reports indicate that the reason for this replacement was the removal of the focal point of the war to the Middle East, with which area Dill is not believed to be well acquainted.’
German spies might not have been expected to know that Churchill had grown tired of Dill, whom he viewed as insufficiently gung-ho, but the idea that Brooke knew the Middle East better than Dill was a strange one. Both men’s service histories, which showed that Dill had recently commanded British forces in Palestine, while Brooke had never served in the region, were a matter of public record. Even if the Abwehr had somehow not compiled basic dossiers on enemy commanders, they were available in the Army List that the British government published twice a year. Had no one in Germany thought to procure a copy before the war? Or had whoever compiled the briefing not thought to check?
This rush of captured documents told Clarke that he had an ideal audience, one that was keen to buy the stories he was selling. Indeed, the Italian assessment of Cyprus showed evidence that it was telling itself stories. The map estimated 5,000 troops around the city of Paphos at the western end of the island, four times the real number. This wasn’t the result of anything A Force had put across. But the city had been the target of repeated bombing and reconnaissance over the summer. ‘The Italians obviously regard the area as of great importance and assume we must have garrisoned it strongly,’ the British intelligence assessment concluded.
Rommel’s retreat in North Africa was only one of the areas where Germany was facing setbacks that winter. The invasion of Russia had ground to a halt outside Moscow, as Hitler’s troops and their weapons froze.
Then in December, on the other side of the world, Japanese planes launched a surprise attack on the US Navy at Pearl Harbor. The war had spread to the Pacific, where the British Empire and dominions faced a new enemy in Japan. But they had also gained a powerful ally in America.
Clarke had now been a deceiver for a year, a period that had also seen him play the spy, sit in a police cell, escape from a torpedoed ship, and turn down a move back to London and a likely promotion. The early months had seen more failure than success, but there were signs that some of the tricks he was performing were starting to fool his audience.
‘We felt, in fact, on the eve of 1942 that we were beginning to know how to plan deception, and that at last we had a well-oiled machine available to implement our plans,’ he wrote later. ‘The organ was now built, its stops were ready for us to pull at will, and all we had to do now was write the music and gain a little more practice in playing it.’
There was a final observation from the captured material. The German estimate for the strength of British forces in the Middle East at the start of November was 24 divisions. The reality was 17. Perhaps, Clarke thought, there might be a way of putting those extra divisions to work.
Chapter 21
At the start of 1942, the British were back where they had been eleven months earlier, at the far side of the Cyrenaica desert, once again at the extreme end of their supply lines. ‘The year opened,’ Clarke later recalled, ‘with bright prospects.’
But Auchinleck was learning, as Wavell had before him, that North Africa rarely got first call on resources. There was always somewhere else that was more urgent. The previous year had ended with Japan and the USA entering the war. In the long term, that would mean more American tanks, planes and men to help fight Germany. In the short term, it meant troops were needed to defend Britain’s Empire in the Far East from the Japanese. Meanwhile, Germany’s advance into Russia had stalled. This was good news, of course, but it meant Allied tanks were being sent to the Eastern front, rather than the desert.
The Soviet Union’s ability to hold German forces had surprised the other Allies. Unfortunately, it was proving harder to do the same to the Japanese. Hong Kong had fallen on Christmas Day 1941. They’d taken Manila a week later. Singapore fell in the middle of February. It was an advance as stunning as that achieved by the Germans in 1940.
Suddenly the Australian government was worried about its own defences, and demanding the return of the soldiers it had sent to North Africa. So A Force’s first job of the year was to provide cover for the redeployment of 60,000 Australians from Syria to the Far East. Clarke had little confidence that the movement of so many people from a place where the Axis had so many informants would stay secret for long. His main hope was that the enemy could be misled about where they were going. Again, this would be tricky: with the Japanese making gains around the Pacific, anyone could see where men were needed.
Further complicating matters, there were lots of other places that the commanders didn’t want the Germans to think that troops were being sent. Auchinleck was hoping to advance further into Libya, so didn’t want to give the impression of excessive strength at his front with Rommel. The navy was moving a convoy through the Mediterranean, so didn’t want the U-boat packs out hunting for troop ships heading towards Malta. In the end, they’d settled on a story that they were going to be used to retake Crete. Clarke felt a bit hopeless about it, especially when the Australian prime minister gave a speech making it clear that the country’s young men were now going to be fighting much closer to home. But the story turned out to be sufficiently plausible for the Germans to reinforce Crete in haste.
Over on the Egyptian border with Libya, there was a thorn in the British side: the Axis garrison at Halfaya Pass. In the summer, Wavell’s Battleaxe assault had failed partly as a result of the German 88mm guns dug in at Halfaya, which wrought havoc on the British tanks that had tried to capture the pass. Auchinleck’s solution had been to sweep round to the south of these strongholds, but now they had to be dealt with.
No one relished the prospect of another assault on Halfaya, christened ‘Hellfire’ by Allied soldiers. The terrain was ideal for defenders, who could stay in protected positions and pick off exposed attackers as they climbed the winding road uphill through the pass. One option was to wait the Germans out: they were cut off, and their army was now 300 miles away. But their continuing presence was a significant problem, making it harder for the British to move supplies up to the forces at the front.
In an effort to persuade the defenders to surrender, A Force turned to one of its more unusual recruits. Eric Titterington had lived in Cairo for two decades. He’d gone to school in Cambridge, before becoming apprenticed to a pharmacist. He’d served in France in the Great War and then had moved to Egypt to become private chemist to the king, a job he’d held ever since. One of his responsibilities was preventing poisonings, which explained his nickname: ‘Titters the Taster’.
Maunsell had grabbed Titterington at the start of the war to work in his censorship bureau. Officially, his work there was testing letters for secret inks. Unofficially Maunsell and Clarke used him to fake documents. Titters had recruited a Polish forger to help him with that, and at the end of 1941 the team formally joined A Force, in what would become known as its ‘Technical Unit’. The bulk of the forgery was creating fake identity cards and travel papers for MI9’s work helping prisoners of war to escape, but sometimes, as now, it meant creating fake orders.
Specifically, Clarke asked Titterington to fake a letter from Rommel to the commander at Halfaya, giving him permission to surrender. Military intelligence had been unable to pick up wireless signals from Halfaya, and the hope was that the defenders no longer had a functioning radio.
Almost the moment the plan had been signed off, it ran into problems. By the end of the war, Titterington would have built up a stock of 1,200 different types of paper, but at the end of 1941 he was still missing crucial elements. Rommel’s force had months earlier been upgraded from the ‘Afrika Korps’ to ‘Panzergruppe Afrika’, but Titters only had samples of the old headed notepaper. Hoping the commander would assume that Rommel was being thrifty and using up his old stock, the deceivers went ahead and produced a note on the old paper, complete with Rommel’s signature. It praised the men of Halfaya’s ‘heroic resistance’ and said there was no need to ‘demand more sacrifices’.
Titterington’s team faked a German army seal, and used captured rubber stamps to mark the message urgent and secret. Unable to use a captured German aircraft as they had hoped, the deceivers resorted to dropping it at night from a British plane, and hoping no one on the ground noticed. Operation Gripfix, as the mission was called, was relying on a lot of hope.
Reality didn’t deliver. Although the German radio was broken, the Italian one wasn’t, enabling the German commander to check his orders. The plan, Clarke said later, ‘might well have worked’ were it not that, the same morning the fake message arrived, a real one came from Hitler ‘saying that Halfaya was assisting the battle considerably by its resistance and appealing to its defenders to carry on as long as possible.’
It was more than two weeks before the Halfaya garrison did eventually surrender. Afterwards, its commander was heard telling one of his fellow officers that he’d thought it odd Rommel had used the old notepaper.
Meanwhile Bagnold’s attempt to build a deception empire was causing Clarke more and more irritation. The newcomer had been persuaded to change his job title to ‘Camouflage’, which was something. But although he had great plans for his new outfit, and was already taking on responsibilities in the field, he had no staff. And so Clarke was told that, while Bagnold found recruits and trained them, A Force would fill in for him.
The argument had run through December and January, with Clarke insisting that it was impossible to separate the different elements of deception, and that it should be tightly controlled by someone who knew what they were doing – him – and his superiors telling him he needed to support Bagnold, and even train his team.
Just as Clarke’s temper reached boiling point, the argument was settled by Rommel.
Chapter 22
Four days after Halfaya surrendered, on 21 January 1942, a British lookout on the other side of the Cyrenaica desert spotted a group of tanks approaching from the direction of the front line. His assumption, that it was a friendly patrol, was swiftly reassessed when it opened fire. The pendulum of the desert war was about to swing back.
This may sound familiar. It was an echo of events a year earlier. In 1941, troops had been pulled away from North Africa to defend Greece. This time they’d been summoned to the Far East. In 1941, Wavell hadn’t believed Rommel would attack before his forces were all ready. This time, Auchinleck hadn’t believed the Germans would be ready to counter-attack so swiftly after their retreat. And, just as in 1941, a British advance westwards was suddenly followed by a hasty retreat east.
As Rommel pushed forward, it quickly became clear that he had, unconsciously, been running a deception operation of his own. The German commander’s complaints to Berlin about the weakness of his forces and their lack of supplies had been intercepted, decrypted by the Bletchley Park codebreakers, and passed on to Cairo. This ‘most secret’ intelligence, codenamed ‘Ultra’, was becoming an increasingly reliable source of information about the Axis, but it had to be handled with care.
‘Nothing is easier than self-deceit,’ the ancient Greek statesman Demosthenes said. ‘For what every man wishes, that he also believes to be true.’ It was unfortunate for the Auk that this was true of his intelligence chief. Ultra material had mentioned that Rommel was getting new tanks. The scouts of the Long Range Desert Group reported seeing them. But Shearer, who preferred to deliver optimistic reports, refused to accept this evidence.
Out in the desert, Auchinleck’s hope at the start of the month that he might drive the Axis forces out of North Africa altogether had been rapidly abandoned. On the evening of 2 February, having returned from a visit to the front, the Auk and Shearer summoned Clarke to Grey Pillars.
The pair painted a grim picture of the situation. Rommel had advanced 200 miles in ten days. Benghazi was cut off. The troops holding the front line were thinly spread and there was little to stop a further German advance if they decided to make one. What Auchinleck badly needed was time to establish a new defensive line. Could Clarke persuade Rommel to hold off his attack, by making him think that the forces ahead of him were stronger than they were?
The request, to Clarke, illustrated the difficulty with trying to split tactical and strategic deception. It was bound to mean trying to make the forces facing the Germans look stronger than they were. That was surely tactical deception. But it was also likely to involve persuading the enemy that Auchinleck’s army had not been stripped of soldiers, and that he had some sort of plan to fight back – strategic deception. It was hard to imagine that Clarke wouldn’t need dummy tanks, but the dummy tanks were now under Bagnold’s command.
Clarke flew out to the desert at dawn the following morning, but before he left he dictated a blistering memo setting out what he saw as the idiocy of the new structure.
Britain’s force in North Africa had been formally named the Eighth Army towards the end of the previous year. Its commander was General Neil Ritchie. He’d been appointed in crisis the previous December, when the previous commander had proved out of his depth during Crusader. But Ritchie too was struggling. He had little experience of tank warfare – few British commanders did – and none of handling such a large force. His immediate subordinates both seemed to feel they’d do better without him. Clarke landed to find him in the midst of another retreat. ‘Dense streams of vehicles were flowing back,’ he wrote, ‘and the Eighth Army Headquarters was being rapidly packed up in a blinding sandstorm.’
The Auk’s orders were already out of date. Rommel would soon pass the place where Clarke had been asked to hold him. Ritchie was moving his own base back inside the Egyptian border. Clarke asked him what he wanted.
Getting generals to be precise at moments like this took skill. They wanted lots of things. Often, as Wavell had done in his early deceptions, they would talk about what they wanted the enemy to think. Clarke eventually settled on asking them to imagine that they could make a phone call to Hitler and ask him to issue an instruction: what would that order be?
What Ritchie desperately wanted was time. ‘Stop the enemy attempting any further advance for the next three to four weeks,’ he said. That would give him a moment to gather his forces and build a defensive line.
This too was an echo of the orders Clarke had received a year earlier. Then, he had tried to threaten the German supply lines, and learned that this was ineffective against Rommel. Another approach might be to imply that a British counter-attack was imminent. But, Clarke said afterwards, ‘with people like Rommel, if you suggested you were going to attack, his first reaction would be to try and attack first.’ What else was there?
Clarke found a corner amid the chaos of the headquarters and set to work, writing out his thoughts in pencil on a piece of thin paper. ‘Object,’ he printed at the top. ‘To dissuade the enemy from continuing his advance.’ He put down possible ‘factors which will tend to dissuade him in any case’. It was not an entirely hopeful list: British troops putting up more of a fight; evidence that Tobruk was being fortified; and finally ‘any suspicion that he is being led into a trap’. He paused to sharpen his pencil, and looked at what he’d just written. That might do it. ‘This we must work on heavily,’ he added.
Next he listed the thing that would encourage Rommel to push ahead: back at the Egyptian border, Ritchie was building a defensive line to which he could retreat if necessary. If the Germans realised what it was, they might conclude that there was no plan to defend Tobruk. They would be right: Auchinleck had decided that the port wasn’t worth it: the cost of keeping it was, he judged, higher than its strategic value. The works on its defences were stripping them for use elsewhere. So the border work, likely to be visible to reconnaissance flights, was a problem. ‘The story we use must provide some reasonable excuse for this,’ Clarke noted.
‘Suggested story,’ he wrote, and underlined it. ‘We are about to resume the offensive in the near future and the whole of our strategy is designed to place Rommel in the worst possible position.’
The story needed to fit the observed facts, chief among them the speed of the German advance. ‘We have been surrendering ground fairly easily in order to extend his communications to the utmost,’ Clarke scribbled. ‘This giving of ground will stop only when he gets near Tobruk.’
The port was ‘being rapidly converted from a defended fortress to an advanced base, and the whole defence layout (now well known to the enemy in detail) is being altered.’ Perhaps that might plant another doubt in Rommel’s mind.
Finally, there was the question of the defences being built on the Egyptian border. ‘A mobile striking force is getting ready near the frontier,’ he added, before finishing with a call back to his deception of the previous month. ‘An attack against Crete is also being prepared.’
