The illusionist, p.4
The Illusionist, page 4
Around a thousand years later on the other side of the world, the Chinese strategist Sun Pin also had his forces feign cowardice, pretending to flee before the army of his rival P’ang Chüan. He told his men to set fewer cooking fires each night, giving the impression to their pursuers that troops were deserting. Aware that P’ang was overconfident, Sun showed him what he expected to see. P’ang, determined not to let his enemy escape, rushed forward with cavalry, arriving as night fell at a valley, where Sun’s waiting crossbowmen wiped them out. In Chinese tradition, the ambushers knew where to aim because P’ang had ordered a torch lit to read a message that Sun had left carved into a trunk: ‘P’ang Chüan dies beneath this tree’.
Two thousand years after that, in the winter of 1776, George Washington faced the opposite problem as he commanded an undermanned and under-supplied Continental Army in New Jersey. Desperate to deter the much stronger British force from attacking, he made his own side look stronger than it was. He stretched his troops out, billeting them in as many places as possible, so that there seemed to be soldiers everywhere. That made it easier to persuade the enemy to believe the inflated troop numbers Washington’s agents were trying to feed them. The British held off, and at the end of the year Washington, having regrouped his forces, crossed the Delaware River and inflicted a swift series of defeats on them.
But for all the millennia that deception had been practised by commanders, there had been a question mark over it. The Greek poet Quintus Smyrnaeus, writing around AD 350, imagined Neoptolemus, the ‘battle-eager’ son of Achilles, rebuking his fellow Greeks for considering Odysseus’s plan to deceive the Trojans. ‘Strong men fight their enemies face to face,’ he says. ‘Let us not now, therefore, think up any trick or any other contrivance. It is proper for princes to show themselves men in battle.’
The spread of Christianity across Europe, with its teaching that personal behaviour mattered more than outcomes, combined with the rise of the chivalric tradition to push warriors away from guile. Although that didn’t mean they rejected it altogether. At the Battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror’s Normans feigned flight in an effort to lure Harold’s Saxons to break their impenetrable shield wall and pursue them. In the late fifteenth century, defenders at Alhama de Granada put up cloth painted like stone to cover gaps that had been made in their walls.
As the centuries went on, commanders sought victory through surprise. The Duke of Marlborough won the Battle of Blenheim by moving his troops further and faster than his enemy had believed possible. James Wolfe captured Quebec by sending his men up a cliff that the French defenders considered inaccessible.
Deception was even celebrated, in certain contexts. Robert Baden-Powell became a national hero in Britain after the Siege of Mafeking of 1899 and 1900, where he used a huge range of ingenious tricks to persuade the Boer attackers that his defending force was far stronger than it was.
But there was a tension between this and the idea that victory should come from honourable and straightforward behaviour. It was summed up in the 1869 Soldier’s Pocket-Book for Field Service: ‘As a nation we are bred up to feel it a disgrace even to succeed by falsehood; the word spy conveys something as repulsive as slave; we will keep hammering along with the conviction that “honesty is the best policy”, and that truth always wins in the long run.’ This, the author argued, was silly. ‘These pretty little sentences do well for a child’s copy book, but the man who acts upon them in war had better sheathe his sword for ever.’
The First World War had brought innovations, some in response to technology. Rifles allowed soldiers to hit targets at a much greater distance. British troops who had fought in South Africa two decades earlier in bright red jackets designed to impress the enemy now wore khaki uniforms that were intended to make them hard to spot.
At sea, ships were given ‘dazzle paint’, jagged stripes that made it difficult for U-boats to correctly judge their course and distance. Some ships were given fake ‘Quaker’ guns to make them look more dangerous than they really were – a trick that had been working in one form or another since at least the American War of Independence. Others concealed real guns, making themselves look like harmless cargo ships in the hope that submarines would try to save torpedoes and surface to attack them with a gun, at which point the crew would reveal their own weapons and fire back.
But there were distinct limits to the military’s innovations, as the deadlock of trench warfare showed. Despite years of stalemate, the military struggled to imagine alternatives to the costly frontal assaults. In early 1917, a British commander on the Western Front proposed catching the Germans off guard by launching an attack after only two days’ artillery barrage, instead of the usual seven. The idea was rejected. The commander was Edmund Allenby, a cavalryman by training who was deeply frustrated at the unimaginative tactics he saw in the trenches, and which claimed the life of his only son.
That summer, he was assigned to command the British army in the Middle East, with orders to break the German-Turkish lines and capture Palestine. Determined to do things differently, he quickly agreed a plan for a feint attack at the western end of the line while the bulk of his force advanced in the east. That this was regarded as innovative says a lot about the state of military thinking at the time.
The following year, Allenby went further. Planning a push on to Damascus, he decided to reverse the previous year’s approach: he would feint in the west and strike in the east. To assist the enemy in thinking that the attack was coming in the wrong place, he went to elaborate lengths, building a huge camp where the enemy could see it, complete with dummy horses, and marching troops up to it each day, before spiriting them back to their real camps at night, only to have them march up again the next day. When his forces rolled forward, they took 75,000 prisoners at a cost of 5,000 British casualties.
What was surprising, given how successful deception had been for Allenby, was how little effort the British made to learn from this. T. E. Lawrence, who had worked for Allenby, remarked that deceptions ‘for the ordinary general were just witty hors d’oeuvres before battle’.
This wasn’t simply pig-headedness. There was an assumption that what had worked once wouldn’t work again, and that advances in technology would make it harder to deceive future enemies. Both sides, after all, now had fast planes and advanced cameras, allowing them to see far further than the Duke of Wellington could when he remarked a century earlier that ‘all the business of war’ was ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill’.
Serious military thinkers also offered practical objections to deception. The nineteenth-century Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, whose theories about warfare remain influential even today, argued that any convincing deceptive move would require so much effort that it would take troops away from fighting that they could more usefully be doing. The only people, he said, who should be thinking about such things were commanders so weak and desperate that they had no other options. This was hardly how a typical British general was trained to think of himself.
At least one person, however, had been paying attention to Allenby’s deceptions. One of his staff officers in Palestine was Wavell. He was no ordinary general, and two decades later, and now in command in the Middle East himself, he was determined to apply what he had learned.
In appointing Clarke he was making deceiving the enemy a full-time occupation, rather than an occasional indulgence. Short of men and equipment, with both having to travel by sea from Britain – either on a long route round the whole of Africa or a dangerous one through the Mediterranean – he was looking for anything that would give him the edge.
In effect, Wavell was asking Clarke to put on a show for the enemy. He was the ideal man for the job.
Among the many unusual jobs Clarke had taken on in his career in the army, perhaps the most surprising was ‘theatrical impresario’. He’d begun on a modest scale, putting on a play with fellow officers in 1923 in which he took the lead role. But his work escalated to a quite different level when he was asked to organise the Artillery’s contribution to the 1925 Royal Tournament, with the instruction that it should be ‘the greatest show ever seen in Olympia’. In the ensuing months, Clarke would locate and train oxen, camels, and even elephants, as well as actors to play their African and Indian handlers. By the time of the show, he had 680 men, 300 animals and 37 guns under his command. He’d gone on to write the end-of-term panto for his Staff College class. Then, posted to Aden, he organised the celebrations for King George V’s silver jubilee, which culminated in a simulated amphibious assault that he claimed later was so convincing some of his audience fled, believing that the Italians had invaded.
Wavell may not have appreciated it, but the performance he wanted now would be of a particular kind. If deception was an idea the military treated with suspicion, on the stage it was one with a very long pedigree. All theatre relies on the suspension of disbelief – we know the man on the stage isn’t really a thousand-year-old Scottish king, and that the dagger before him won’t hurt anyone – but there was one group of people who had, for centuries, been leading audiences to look the wrong way and draw the wrong conclusions. They understood the importance of what you display and what you conceal, of misdirection, of lines of sight. The trouble was, no one took them very seriously.
In the 1970s, two American academics, J. Bowyer Bell and Barton Whaley, discovered a mutual fascination with deception, and a frustrating lack of work on the subject. They began to look into it themselves, and eventually concluded that the only people who really understood the field were magicians.
Apart from anything else, they got far more practice. Allenby had spent months working on a single deception. A jobbing stage illusionist performs a couple of dozen every evening. The only people who came close in terms of activity were card sharps and con artists, and their trick rate was still far below that of the average children’s entertainer.
As it happened, Clarke had a magician in the family. His uncle Sidney, a barrister by day, was in his spare time an obsessive conjurer, who had been captivated by magic since childhood. He served as chairman of the Magic Circle, the society for magicians, and spent three decades compiling the first exhaustive history of the art.
Sidney, his waistcoat always grey with tobacco ash, was a bachelor uncle in the best traditions of the Edwardian era, doting on his nephews and nieces, putting them up in school holidays, collecting cigarette cards for them, and of course performing tricks. He could be relied upon to greet them with the astonished discovery of half-crowns behind their ears or up their noses. Once, to the delight of Dudley’s brother, there was a ten-shilling note in a boiled egg.
He never explained that trick, but there were other secrets he was happy to reveal to the children, as he showed them the ways that people’s credulity could be exploited. He’d served as a writer on Old Moore’s Almanack, the astonishingly long-running book of astrological forecasts, but told them his own successful contributions owed nothing to the movements of the heavens: ‘Purely a matter of statistics, my boy. Find out most big fires occur in August and you predict an August conflagration in one of our major cities.’
Dudley, Sidney’s godson, inherited his uncle’s enthusiasm. His first recorded effort at using illusion to distract the attention of targets – in this case his two younger siblings – was as a twelve-year-old. ‘Raining,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Gave conjuring show in my bedroom. Sister born.’
Sidney had introduced Dudley to deception and showmanship, and the teenager had got a taste for them on a grander scale as a cadet in Woolwich. Living in London for the first time, he’d fallen in love with the theatre. It wasn’t the tragedies of Shakespeare or the comedies of Oscar Wilde that drew him, but the then-popular melodramas, which won audiences by promising thrilling on-stage stunts – simulated car chases and actual horse races, all apparently live before your eyes. He was such a devoted fan of one show that he was invited to watch from the wings as the heroine rode a real motorbike across a rickety plank to escape her pursuers.
By 1940, the music halls that had enthralled Clarke in his youth had been eclipsed by cinema. He’d transferred his affections, or at least widened them to include this new medium. In 1936 he bought a 16mm movie camera, an expensive toy at the time, and he delighted in shooting film. His younger brother Thomas shared that passion and would become one of Britain’s great screenwriters, the brains behind the Ealing comedies Passport to Pimlico and The Lavender Hill Mob. Having spent his teens and twenties sitting in theatres, Dudley would spend his forties in cinemas.
Movies, like theatre and illusion, deceive. In Hollywood, film-makers had quickly learned that clever camera placement could make it look as though someone was dangling from a building, keeping the mattress beneath them out of shot. Meanwhile their Russian counterparts, their thoughts on higher things than mere entertainment, had formed a theory about what made cinema distinctive from other art forms: the ability to cut between different images to tell a story. We see a woman smile, but we don’t know what’s making her happy until we get the next shot. Is it a child running through the door or a bank clerk filling a bag at gunpoint? The juxtaposition of images is what allows cinema to tell stories.
Generals and their intelligence officers don’t simply try to locate enemy armies on a map. They try to understand why those troops are there and where they’re going next. In effect, they tell themselves a story about what their opponent is doing. Wavell’s hope was that he could persuade the Italians to make the wrong deductions.
There was a great deal that Clarke and Wavell didn’t understand about deception at the end of 1940, but one thing they grasped right from the beginning was that they weren’t trying to simply persuade the enemy to believe a series of false facts. They were trying to get him to assemble those facts into a false story.
The Multiplying Flags January–April 1941
The Magician takes three small pieces of coloured tissue paper, squeezes them in their hands, transforming them into hundreds of tiny red, white and blue flags.
Chapter 5
The first story that Wavell wanted Clarke to tell the Italians was about East Africa. While one part of his army pressed westward, attempting to cut off the retreating Italians and capture the ports along Libya’s north coast, the general’s mind was turning to the next place he planned to fight. Italy’s capture of British Somaliland meant it controlled the entire Horn of Africa, posing a threat to ships from the Far East whether they were travelling through the Red Sea to the Suez Canal, or following the coast towards South Africa and around the Cape of Good Hope.
Wavell’s plan was to drive the Italians out of East Africa altogether, striking from Kenya to the southwest, and Sudan to the northwest. It would therefore be helpful if the Italians were expecting the attack to come from the northeast, beginning with the recapturing of British Somaliland, by an amphibious assault launched across the Gulf of Aden. When he met Clarke, the general had already sketched out a plan, codenamed ‘Camilla’, for how he hoped to persuade them that this was exactly his idea.
‘The following is a picture of my plans and intentions that I should like to put across to the other side,’ he began, before setting out across two pages what he wanted his enemy to believe. The plan opened with a personal point that Wavell believed ‘might appeal to the Italian’, that this campaign for him was a matter of personal honour. ‘The loss of British Somaliland has always rankled bitterly both with my government and myself,’ he wrote, portraying himself as a vainer man than he was, working for a capricious leader. ‘I got a rocket from the government and nearly lost my job at the time. I have orders to recapture it as soon as resources are available, and am most anxious to remove this blot on my reputation.’
In the false story Wavell was writing, he planned to send a small force into British Somaliland, relying entirely on surprise. The build-up of troops in Kenya and Sudan was, in this tale, a cover for the real attack: ‘As part of this plan of deception I am sending two brigades of Indians to the Sudan, hoping that their presence will become known to the enemy and will make them think an offensive in the Sudan is intended.’
Having drawn the picture he wished the Italians to see, he turned to the question he wanted Clarke to work on. ‘Now, what means can we take to get this picture across?’ he asked. ‘The advantage of it seems to me to be that the greater part of it is true, the enemy will see for himself that the greater part of it is actually being done, what we want is for him to place the wrong interpretation on what he sees.’
To help the Italians reach the conclusions he wanted, Wavell planned to rely heavily on his officers’ inability to keep a secret. ‘We could be a little bit indiscreet in discussing it, and it will be odd if some sort of chat does not run round the bars, etc., in Aden,’ he wrote. ‘We might issue, again most confidentially, maps of Somaliland to the battalions of the 11th Indian Brigade.’
Would it, he wondered, be possible to put the story over directly? ‘We have probably bust the channel we used before,’ he wrote, in what seems to be a reference to the Japanese source used ahead of ‘Compass’. ‘But it should not be impossible to find others and there are many ingenious methods of carelessness with important documents. There are also the usual matters of movement of shipping, wireless traffic, preparation of camps, enquiries about supplies, etc. etc.’
