The illusionist, p.30
The Illusionist, page 30
Clarke’s problem was that Bodyguard described a series of wildly inconsistent stories in the Mediterranean. For the early part of the year, there was supposed to be an imminent invasion of the Balkans. Then in June, as troops were landing in northern France, A Force was asked to create an invasion threat in southern France, to try to keep German units pinned down there. Then in August, when there really was going to be an invasion of southern France, A Force was to say that there wasn’t.
At another point in the war, Clarke might have objected to this, but he accepted that nothing was more important than the success of ‘Overlord’. In May, he issued a ‘special order of the day’ to his team of double agent handlers: ‘In the past, when nearing the climax of any plan, we have been at pains to conserve our machinery for another day. This time that policy will no longer hold.’ If a successful deception destroyed a double agent’s credibility, it was a price worth paying. ‘Once we have entered the month of June, all considerations regarding the safety of our channels… are to be subordinated to the demands of the plans on which we are now working, and every risk accepted which can further the success of these plans.’
As Clarke and his team pondered how they might explain why the Allies would have called off an invasion of the Balkans at the last minute and decided to attack southern France instead, they got an unexpected helping hand. In April, Greek soldiers in Egypt mutinied, holding out for several weeks, until British forces fired on their camp, forcing them to surrender. It provided the ideal excuse for a change of plans: A Force put out the story that the Greeks were in no condition to liberate their homeland, and so France had become the target instead. The final twist came at the end of June when, having spent a month suggesting an invasion was imminent, they changed their story again, saying that it had been postponed because German forces hadn’t left the French coast and gone north, as had been expected.
Zeppelin and its accompanying operations were judged a success. After the war, with access to German documents, Clarke calculated that in 1944 A Force’s deception efforts had helped to pin 35 enemy divisions in the Mediterranean. Hitler needed troops in the Balkans to keep control and fight partisans, but not the 25 divisions that he kept there, ready to fight an invasion that he believed to be imminent but the Allies had neither intention nor capability to deliver. During June only one of the ten divisions on France’s south coast moved north.
There was one more deception stunt in the days before D-Day that would become famous. It was Clarke’s idea, and he was rather proud of it.
I. Generally reported as: ‘In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’ This version comes from an extract of the minutes in Clarke’s files.
Chapter 42
At the start of January 1944, Clarke was just outside Naples, visiting Allied forces there. He was now largely based in Algiers, where he had a new secretary, Daphne Llewellyn, the 21-year-old sister of Hermione Ranfurly. She had discovered that order of battle deceptions had uses for manipulating allies as well as the enemy. The French administrators of Algiers frowned on frivolity while the mother country was under the fascist occupation, but had been persuaded to allow each army regiment to hold one dance a year. But Llewellyn, working for Clarke, knew that regiments only needed to be imagined to exist. She set about inventing fictional outfits to hold dances, soon known as ‘Daphne’s Dives’. Clarke was an enthusiastic supporter of such creativity.
Over in Italy, he’d worked in the morning, then headed away in the afternoon to do a spot of tourism, visiting the ruins of Pompeii. A nearby American unit was getting a screening of one of the previous year’s hit films, Five Graves to Cairo, made by a talented new director, Billy Wilder. Clarke was never a man to miss a movie, especially one that promised to tell ‘the startling inside story’ of how Rommel had been defeated in the desert, so he went along.
It did not, whatever the trailer claimed, reveal the secrets of the victory at El Alamein, but it was an entertaining film for all that, telling the tale of a retreating British soldier who finds himself mistaken by Rommel for a top German agent. What caught Clarke’s attention was one of the supporting actors, Miles Mander, who played an English colonel. Wearing a black beret, he bore a striking resemblance to General Montgomery. Something about his appearance in a film about mistaken identity set the cogs in Clarke’s mind turning. Hollywood had been getting a lot of material from the war, and now Clarke was going to take an idea back.
There was no concealing the fact that there would be an Allied invasion that year. The question was where and when. There was value in misleading the enemy about timing, persuading them to relax a little at just the wrong moment.
Monty was now Britain’s most famous commander, his movements the subject of intense enemy interest. Clarke had used that as part of Barclay, arranging a ‘leave’ in Palestine for the general in early July 1943 that was intended to show that no attack was imminent. Perhaps he could pull a similar trick again, and this time, with a bit more style.
It had just been announced that Montgomery was going to be commander-in-chief of the British group of invasion armies. ‘Supposing,’ Clarke mused, ‘he were to be seen somewhere in the Mediterranean a day or two before the Normandy invasion, the Germans could take it as a certain indication that they had at least a week or more to wait before the landings came in North West Europe.’
Where could Monty reliably be seen? There was one place where Allied commanders came and went ‘under the direct eyes of the enemy’: Gibraltar. The airfield there was the northernmost part of the British territory, right next to the Spanish border. And just across the frontier, the Germans had set up an observation point where they could watch the comings and goings through binoculars.
Clarke presented a copy of his plan the following month. A Force’s man on Gibraltar was an old friend of his, a one-eyed artilleryman named Harry Gummer, and he looked it over. Clarke’s proposal was that the plane carrying ‘Monty’ simply stop to refuel, allowing the fake general to get out and be observed. But Gummer feared this was overestimating the competence of the German agent watching the airfield, who didn’t usually report much more than aircraft or ship movements. It would be ‘advantageous’, he said, if ‘Monty’ could be met with a bit of ceremony, and leave the airport, a journey that would take him closer to the observation point. Gummer suggested a visit to the governor.
In April, plan ‘Copperhead’ was approved. In London Gilbert Lennox, an MI5 officer, was put in charge of finding an actor. His first thought was to get Miles Mander, as Clarke had suggested. Alas, Clarke recorded, ‘discreet inquiries in Hollywood had shown that Mr Mander was unfortunately several inches taller than the general, and this was a physical handicap it was impossible to disguise.’ Lennox found a substitute who immediately ruled himself out by breaking a leg in a road accident. Like a lot of clever schemes, this one was proving harder than it sounded.
And then, just as he was beginning to despair of finding a Montgomery impersonator, someone else did the job for him. ‘Recognise the picture below?’ began a brief article in the News Chronicle over a picture apparently of Montgomery. ‘You’re wrong. His name is James – Lieutenant Clifton James, producer and chief performer in the Royal Army Pay Corps Drama and Variety Group.’
Clifton James was, in the words of Noel Wild, ‘a second-rate actor’ who had so far spent the war making sure the rest of the army got paid. He didn’t know why he’d been sent to the Pay Corps – he had no head for figures – but they let him put on shows for the troops in his spare time. Watching one of them, the News Chronicle’s photographer had noticed that James was the spitting image of Montgomery, and asked him to pose in the general’s trademark beret. James, a nervous sort, feared he’d be disciplined for impersonating an officer. Instead he got a phone call the following month from David Niven.
The Hollywood star, still in touch with Clarke, was the perfect person to approach an actor. Niven asked James if he would mind popping down to London to discuss working on some military films. It was a plausible reason to take him away from his unit, but an unintentionally cruel one: James believed he was finally getting his big break. Instead, he was asked to sign the Official Secrets Act.
Wild had spoken to Montgomery about the operation. ‘He is all out to support the plan,’ he reported back, ‘and has gone so far as to say he will lend us any clothing.’ In the event, they approached his tailor instead. MI5’s Guy Liddell was caustic about his motives: ‘Monty is rather flattered by the whole plan, which of course is based on the theory that the Second Front cannot possibly start without him.’
Lennox set about preparing James for his role. Much of this work was mental. While James might have resembled Montgomery physically, psychologically he was as far from the general as it was possible to be. Unlike the man he would be impersonating, he was plagued by self-doubt. Watching newsreels of Montgomery, he worried he would struggle to match the ‘tremendous air of assurance’. He was also weighed down by guilt at having to lie to his wife about what he was doing.
Over in Gibraltar, Gummer was having doubts, too. Having concluded that the German airport observer was not up to the job of spotting an intelligence scoop even when it got out of a plane in front of him, he was trying to construct a visit that would expose the fake Montgomery to as many Axis intelligence sources as possible. He’d arranged for a group of Spanish air force officers to run into him during a visit to Gibraltar, and for him to travel around in an open-top car. He wanted to prime locals as well, by getting a picture of Montgomery into the Gibraltar paper a couple of days before the visit. The care he was devoting to ensuring that enemy spies should recognise Britain’s most famous general revealed a lot about the Allied assessment of enemy intelligence capabilities in 1944.
In London, James had got his uniform, and got the hang of Montgomery’s salute. Dennis Wheatley was ordered to arrange for him to go up in a plane, to check he didn’t suffer from airsickness – it would be no good if the Montgomery lookalike staggered onto the runway at Gibraltar and threw up. Finally, James was allowed to meet the general himself. The pair chatted about their childhoods in Australia, where James had been born, and Montgomery’s father had been a bishop, and the actor tried to get a sense of the man he was going to impersonate.
Gummer meanwhile was encountering problem after problem. Wild had vetoed the newspaper article, presumably because it would have been laying things on a little too thick. The Spanish officers weren’t going to be allowed to come. Instead one of the governor’s aides, Miles Clifford, had been persuaded to invite the Spanish vice-consul to Government House, where he’d have a chance to accidentally see the bogus general. The vice-consul could be relied upon to report to the Spanish intelligence service, and they could be relied upon to pass the story to Berlin.
As the day approached, James felt increasing strain. The pressure of the role was unlike anything he was used to. Impersonating the abstemious Montgomery, he would be forbidden his usual nerve-steadying drinks and cigarettes. In a moment when it looked like the show might have to be called off, an MI5 officer suddenly noticed that James was missing the middle finger of his right hand, a wound from the previous war. A prosthetic was hastily crafted from sticking plaster and cotton wool.
On board the flight, things continued to go wrong. The journey was terrible, and the officer who was supposed to be playing one of Montgomery’s aides was too airsick to get off the plane. The pilot feared the weather might be too bad to land at Gibraltar. On the ground, Gummer learned that the Spanish vice-consul had cancelled.
And then, just as with the best theatrical shows, everything came together. The pilot got the plane down. James, walking onto the stage, said his first line and realised that he might be able to pull it off. And best of all, Gummer learned that in the vice-consul’s place the Spanish were sending Ignacio Molina.
This was a particularly happy moment. Though Molina was officially an employee of the Spanish government, MI5 knew him to be on the Abwehr payroll, and suspected him of having helped a team of Italian frogmen sent to plant mines on ships at Gibraltar. They had been trying to get him banned from the Rock for years. At one stage, they’d even considered kidnapping him and taking him to London. This would be better revenge.
Lieutenant Clifton James, Royal Army Pay Corps, saluted and waved to passers-by as he was driven to the governor’s residence. The response was delight. Waiting there for him, with a guard of honour at attention, was the governor himself, an old friend of Montgomery’s.
‘Hello, Monty, glad to see you,’ he said as his visitor got out of the car. ‘Hello Rusty, how are you?’ replied James, and the pair walked inside, chatting warmly. In private, at least according to James, the governor expressed his astonishment: ‘You are Monty. I’ve known him for years.’
Next door, Miles Clifford, Colonial Secretary, was waiting to play his part. He hadn’t been told that James was a fake, only that Montgomery was visiting, and that it was important he be identified by a Spaniard. At ten that morning, he received Molina, and the pair spent a few minutes discussing the official reason for the visit, before Clifford suggested they go and speak to one of the governor’s staff. As they walked through the gate, they were greeted by the carefully timed sight of Sir Ralph putting ‘Monty’ back into the car.
Whatever Gummer’s views of the rest of the Abwehr’s agents, Molina didn’t need any help identifying the visitor. He turned to Clifford who, ‘with well-feigned embarrassment’, confessed that this was indeed Montgomery, on his way to Algiers. It was all Molina could do to contain his excitement. The moment his meeting was over, Gummer reported, ‘he motored very fast’ back across the border, and placed an ‘urgent’ long-distance telephone call. ‘I imagine, therefore, that by now the good tidings are on their way to Berlin’.
The Monty’s Double caper wasn’t quite over. James would have to repeat his act three hours later in Algiers, where he was greeted by cheering crowds, before being driven, with American motorcycle outriders, to the Allied headquarters. There he was shown into a private room, where he changed into the uniform of a pay corps lieutenant, before sneaking out through the kitchens to an A Force villa, where Clarke was waiting to congratulate him on a part well-played.
The next day James flew to Cairo, badly in need of several drinks and under orders to lie low. Betty Crichton, who helped to look after him, was full of sympathy for a man who was finding coming off the stage as difficult as going onto it had been. According to A Force legend, her husband Michael invited James to join him for a whisky, and then excused himself and left the room, returning later to find James snoring and the bottle empty.
Copperhead was a terrific caper, but even Clarke was willing to concede there was no evidence it affected Germany’s readiness for invasion. He had wanted ‘Monty’ to appear in Gibraltar close to D-Day, but the operation was pushed earlier, and the invasion was delayed, so that it would have been quite possible for the general to have got back to Britain in time.
Like Mincemeat, though, it was the kind of story people couldn’t keep to themselves. While Clarke’s team was busily restricting the number of people in the know around the Mediterranean, it was quickly the subject of gossip and jokes in Allied Headquarters in Britain. It reached the newspapers before the end of 1945, and Clifton James found he had a problem familiar to much more successful actors: he was typecast as Monty’s Double, so famous in that role that nobody wanted to put him on stage in any other.
Years later, Strangeways recalled Copperhead. He was frustrated by the focus on the eye-catching ruses, and, speaking about this episode, more true to Clarke’s vision than Clarke was himself. ‘That wasn’t the thing that did it,’ he explained. ‘It was some stuff dropped in Spain, something else somewhere else, something else somewhere else. And they all got together, all these little bits and pieces, to make the feed. And the icing on the cake was this chap. He did it very well, but it just was a bit extra.’
Chapter 43
In July 1946, three years after the Allied armies stormed the beaches of Sicily, two years after they landed at Normandy and one year after the German surrender, Brigadier Dudley Clarke walked into the lecture theatre of the Imperial Defence College, in Belgrave Square, London. He’d been promoted at the end of 1943. He might have hoped, at the start of the war, for faster and further advancement. When he’d joined up, thirty years earlier, he’d certainly hoped to lead men in combat. But aside from his duties in Palestine before the war and a night on a beach near Boulogne in 1940 with his Commandos, that hadn’t happened.
He was leaving the army now, and looking for a new job. His curriculum vitae was detailed up to the end of 1940, and then vague. ‘In recent years I have specialised in the subject of strategy,’ he wrote. ‘I was directly responsible for certain duties.’
It was to talk about some of those duties that he’d been invited to the college that Wednesday afternoon. His audience was the first post-war class in this school for high-flying officers and civil servants. On the front of his folder of notes were two words with which he was very familiar: ‘TOP SECRET’. Deceivers, he began, are ‘very shy people’. They had a duty to protect people who’d helped them, and they hoped that the work they’d done would be ‘forgotten and generally discounted’.
That wasn’t really true, at least as far as Clarke was concerned. He’d spent much of the previous year arguing that the deception story should be made public. It would be impossible, he’d argued, to write any proper history of the war without talking about deception, which had been ‘inextricably interwoven into almost every strategic and major tactical plan since 1940’. What was more, all sorts of people were already writing histories, some of them clearly with a view to publication, and many of them unaware of the full picture. Clarke had proposed that someone who did know the full history – a list that really contained only his name – should write it, and it should be published. Official historians would need it, he said, before going on to what was really occupying his mind. ‘There is also something to be said for revealing a colourful and often dramatic contribution to the conduct of the war which was wholly British in conception,’ he wrote, in a line that gave a very clear idea of the sort of book he had in mind.
