The illusionist, p.5
The Illusionist, page 5
Working on Camilla with Wavell at that point were Eric Shearer, known as ‘John’, his director of military intelligence, and Raymund J. Maunsell, known as ‘RJ’, who ran a secretive body called Security Intelligence Middle East. SIME was the combined outpost of both MI5 – Britain’s domestic security agency – and MI6 – its foreign intelligence body – in Cairo. Now in his late thirties, Maunsell had originally been commissioned in the Royal Tank Corps, but since 1932 he’d been working in ‘security’ – what would later be called counter-intelligence – in the Middle East. In practice, that meant in Egypt, the centre of British concerns and the place where, in Maunsell’s view, any problem was likely to begin.
Maunsell was a cheery, gregarious man, fond, in his own words, of ‘liquorous family bridge and poker parties’, who seemed to know everyone and aimed to know everything. His job was made easier by the large number of British ex-pats in the senior ranks of the Egyptian police, who, whatever the attitude of the Egyptian government, were fundamentally on the side of the empire. ‘Every schoolboy knows that you build your spy ring slowly and carefully in time of peace,’ he said, and he took the same approach to counter-espionage. Having expected war since at least the Munich crisis of 1938, he was well prepared. His team had ‘deeply penetrated’ the Spanish embassy. He had an agent on the switchboard of the Cairo branch of Dresdner, the German bank, who linked SIME in to telephone calls they wanted to monitor. He had already identified the Germans and Italians he would want to intern.
The Cairo police had a Special Section to deal with ‘subversives’. Maunsell ensured that its officers received ‘subsidies’ to cover ‘their official expenditure on the British government’s behalf’. This, he observed, ‘helped considerably to oil the wheels’. The police in turn paid every doorkeeper in the city ‘a small monthly sum’ to report comings and goings.
Was any of this legal? In Britain, the security services operated, at least in theory, under the supervision of the government. But Cairo had long been a city where visiting Europeans followed a looser code. That went for sex, and apparently it also went for security work. Maunsell did whatever he deemed necessary, seeming to feel accountable only to himself. Wavell, nominally his commander, was happy to let him get on with it. ‘A secure Egypt behind my back is worth two divisions to me,’ he told Maunsell. London tried to take an interest in SIME’s work, but London was a long way away.
Maunsell seemed to have sources everywhere, but then, he was a useful man to know: someone who could pay a bribe, do a favour or fix a problem. Equally, with the weight of the military and the police behind him, he was in a position to make life difficult for anyone who crossed him. It was hardly surprising that, when a British general dropped a decoded telegram containing details of an important forthcoming operation on the balcony at Shepheard’s, the manager sought out Maunsell and handed the message to him.
It helped, too, that he took a relaxed view of human frailty and was unlikely to pass judgement on some of Cairo’s shadier businesses. Indeed, his approach when warned about possible security threats was to try to take the heat out of the situation. ‘The apparently suspicious behaviour of individuals may often be due to the secret pursuit of homoor heterosexual relationships,’ he said.
A lot of people were a long way from home, and some of them faced imminent death. ‘Lonely men and women misconducted themselves all over the place,’ he said. That was only his business if it caused a wider problem, as when a rear admiral and his son, also a naval officer, discovered to their mutual fury that they shared a mistress.
Though he took his work seriously, his approach revealed his strong sense of humour. In 1939, a Japanese military attaché – a job that was often an official cover for a spy – had driven a car through Syria and Palestine with a movie camera fixed to the dashboard, filming details of the roads and strategic locations. It was an excellent reconnaissance effort, and Maunsell took great delight in thwarting it as the diplomat passed through Egypt. The camera was briefly impounded and ‘with the professional help of the Port Said Police, we were able to substitute for the road report a rather horrible, locally made “blue” film.’ All in all, he was a man after Clarke’s own heart. They hit it off from the start.
Installed in his bathroom-office, Clarke set to work at once. If he was daunted by the task he had been set, he showed little sign of it. On his first day in the job, he came up with modifications to Operation Camilla, proposing a plan to use wireless traffic to make it look as though the British base at Aden was becoming the focus of military activity.
After the war Clarke would write a novel whose hero was clearly based on his idea of himself. The character ‘had the air of a man for whom things run easily,’ he wrote, explaining that this was misleading. ‘Few ever guessed at the capacity for taking infinite pains which lay well-hidden behind an easy-going exterior.’
Wavell had probably perceived this quality of Clarke’s. It would have been one of the reasons he liked having him on his staff. And that willingness to take ‘infinite pains’ was evident from the beginning of this deception. Clarke drew up a plan in a table with three columns: first a series of dates over the next two months; then what was actually planned for that date; and finally the ‘effects’ – a bit of stage magic jargon for what he wanted his audience, Italian intelligence, to see and hear.
The first stage was a series of misleading rumours Clarke wanted spread in Egypt, Sudan and Kenya. Troops in Aden and Kenya were given briefings on amphibious landings. Post intended for the 4th Indian Division, a unit already on its way to Sudan, was diverted to Aden. The RAF in Aden were ordered to carry out reconnaissance flights on Somaliland and to bomb coastal defences. Back in Britain, government sources suggested to newspapers that Wavell ‘ought now to clear his reputation by recapturing British Somaliland’.
In Egypt there was no way of concealing the fact that the 11th Infantry Brigade was being loaded onto ships that were heading south down the canal, but Clarke ensured that the ships carried enough food to take their passengers all the way to Aden, rather than their actual destination, Port Sudan, half the distance. His hope was that this information would find its way from the docks to the enemy. Despite Wavell’s concern that the Japanese consul in Port Said would no longer be deemed reliable after the Compass deception, Clarke decided it was worth making sure he was informed that the ships were bound for Aden.
Maunsell was able to help with this. He explained that the diplomat in question, ‘the not inappropriately named Mr Ohno’, was his favourite spy. Enthusiastic but hapless, Michizo Ohno had before the war attempted to recruit two inspectors in the Egyptian police to his cause. He’d believed that this would work because they had Irish names, and would therefore be likely to hate the British. Whatever their ancestral views of the empire, the policemen had a very good idea of who was best-placed to look after their interests, and reported the approach to Maunsell, who had told them to accept the offer, so that he could control the information being passed to the Japanese. Ohno’s people on the canal were in fact Maunsell’s people.
Clarke produced a careful mix of fact and fiction to be fed to the Japanese, including confirmable details about sailing times and specific units along with hard-to-disprove nuggets that pointed towards an invasion of Somaliland.
Finally, Clarke worked out a schedule under which different military outposts were to send signals to each other, with the intensity of messages to and from Aden increasing through January. The enciphered messages were garbage, but that didn’t matter. As Clarke knew, intelligence agencies practise ‘traffic analysis’, watching how the volume and length of messages changes, in the hope of detecting patterns. He hoped the Italians would deduce that the increase in volume of messages between Aden and Cairo was a sign of a forthcoming operation out of Aden.
There were some specific false messages, too. In early January 1941, as the 11th Infantry approached Port Sudan, Aden wired Cairo warning that they weren’t ready to accommodate large numbers of extra troops, and suggesting the incoming forces might have to wait at Port Sudan. That gave an excuse for why the troop carriers weren’t carrying on down the Red Sea.
Although Clarke was a one-man band, he could draw on other people to help. It was typical that he found the most glamorous assistants he could. Prince Aly Khan, the playboy son of the Aga Khan, had found his way into military intelligence via the French Foreign Legion. He was dispatched to Alexandria as the troops were embarking with a bag of messages for Aden, which he handed to one of the ships’ officers.
Others were deployed without their knowledge, including, in a sign of Clarke’s ruthlessness, one of his friends.
Tony Simonds was finally getting some excitement. He was off to Ethiopia, on a secret mission to help raise a rebellion against the Italian occupiers. Before his friend left, Clarke took him aside and, in strict confidence, told him that Wavell was planning to attack British Somaliland from Aden. To Clarke’s mind, Simonds was going behind enemy lines, where he might accidentally leak information, or be captured and interrogated. Either way, it couldn’t hurt to load him up with the false story.
Later, Clarke would describe Camilla as his ‘first fumbling steps’ in the world of military deception, but they were, if anything, remarkably assured. Not everything worked. On the fake radio signals in particular, he ran into both practical objections and the inability of wireless operators to send more messages.
There was, however, a clear impact on the Italians defending British Somaliland: they packed up and left. Having deduced that an overwhelming attack was imminent, they decided there was no point in trying to hold their positions, and pulled back to Ethiopia.
This was, of course, the precise opposite of Wavell’s intention: he’d hoped the Italians would shift troops into British Somaliland, not out of it. He still achieved his military aim, and between February and May 1941, his troops overwhelmed the Italians in Ethiopia and Eritrea. As an exercise in deception, though, Camilla had been at once a total success and a complete failure: he’d fooled the enemy, but they’d gone and done the wrong thing. There was a lesson here, but it would take Clarke a while to understand what it was.
Chapter 6
A couple of weeks after he began working in Cairo, Clarke was passed an extract from the 1940 diary of a captured Italian officer:
3 July. Late in the night, the group is informed that enemy parachutists landed near our area.
It must have made Clarke smile. He knew better than most people how far the British had been from dropping parachutists behind enemy lines the previous July. The idea of arriving from the sky had, naturally, occurred to the Commandos that summer, but they had been hampered by a lack of equipment, of trained men, and of suitable planes to drop from. Clarke had gone on a day’s parachute training himself, before being told he was too old to jump. Six months later, the first parachute unit had only just been formed.
But parachutists had been an effective psychological weapon for the Nazis: their existence meant a defending force was never sure that its ground was secure. Soldiers had to spend their time chasing rumours and false sightings. Now it was time to play that fear back against the enemy. If the Italians believed there were already parachutists ready to strike in the Middle East, it was a fear Clarke could play on. Wavell was keen to exaggerate the strength of his forces, and the prospect of Commandos dropping behind their lines might encourage the Italians to divert men to protect supplies and airfields far from the action.
Plan Abeam, the first deception operation that Clarke conceived and ran himself, could be dismissed as little more than a practical joke, or low-level mischief-making. It had no goal beyond persuading the Italians that Wavell had a brigade of airborne troops at his disposal. But Clarke approached it with complete thoroughness.
By the middle of January 1941 he had drawn up a five-page ‘scenario’, detailing every aspect of his imaginary brigade’s existence. It had a total strength of around 2,000 men, made up of one parachute battalion and two glider battalions. They had arrived at Suez at the end of December, on board two troop ships, and then travelled by train to a desert camp in Transjordan – modern-day Jordan – close enough to threaten North Africa, but far enough away to be hard to check.
Clarke described the brigade’s formation in June 1940, its training near Manchester and then on Salisbury Plain. The parachutists, in his description, carried automatic carbines – lightweight fast-firing rifles suitable for assaults – and were trained in demolition work. The glider troops resembled an ordinary light infantry battalion, but every third man had a Thompson submachine gun. That was, as Clarke was painfully aware, rather more Tommy guns than were currently in England, but the fantasy unit he was building might as well have fantasy kit. He went further: back in London, an inventor had tried to sell the Commandos his design for a new kind of helicopter, and Clarke briefly planned for his imaginary brigade to have 20, carrying senior officers and reconnaissance troops. He was forced to reject this as implausible – the technology wasn’t available – but it’s an example of his vision as a soldier that he foresaw how troops would be arriving in battle two decades later.
The document he produced was one that only a veteran officer, who understood the army’s structures and ways of working, could have written. And if it was supposed to describe a nightmare for the Italians, it sounded an awful lot like the kind of unit he’d dreamed the Commandos would become.
Clarke lifted his fake brigade’s story above the ordinary with details such as the parachutists’ dislike of dropping from Whitley aircraft, which used a hole in the floor, and their relief at discovering the aircraft in the Middle East and North Africa would all allow them to jump from doors. The glider battalions, he wrote, had only had a month’s intense training, and were reluctant to admit that they could have used more preparation.
Having worked out his story, Clarke set about trying to tell it to the enemy. He arranged for additional military patrols in the places where the unit was supposed to be training. Tony Simonds had got to know a young political officer at the Jewish Agency, which represented the interests of Jews in Palestine and beyond. Clarke asked him to see to the spreading of rumours in Syria, Palestine and Iraq of a glider crash that had killed twenty soldiers, and of the Bedouin being forbidden from entering part of the desert.
Then Clarke indulged in a little undercover work of his own. Notified that a known Japanese spy was travelling to Palestine a couple of days later, he booked himself onto the same sleeper train, wearing a red ‘Airborne Division’ armband, and with a parachutist’s wings sewn onto his uniform. He discarded an envelope addressed to ‘Colonel Clarke’ at ‘HQ Airborne Division’ in Salisbury. On arrival in Palestine, he visited the local commander,I who promised Clarke he would ask the Arab Legion to close the part of the desert where the parachutists were supposed to be training.
With Operation Camilla still ongoing, Clarke decided his airborne troops might as well play a part. He had a rubber stamp made up for the unit’s headquarters, and used it on a receipt for maps of British Somaliland and Harar, just over the border in Ethiopia. While in Palestine, he left the receipt in a hotel, in the hope that it would be picked up and passed to enemy intelligence. Maunsell planted another receipt in Cairo.
The press was an obvious way of getting information to the enemy. Clarke released pictures that purported to show an Ethiopian parachutist training alongside British troops. The suggested caption, used in the forces paper, was: ‘Ready to descend on Italy!’ The Ethiopian was, in reality, a Cairo laundryman, but the choice of nationality was an interesting one, suggesting that the British were training up vengeful soldiers from the country the Italians had brutally occupied. The notion of Africans being sent on raids against Italy would be particularly provocative to fascists.
But the sly part of this deception was an easily overlooked detail in the picture. Behind the subject, three airmen could be seen chatting to a fourth man, his back to the camera. He had one stand-out feature: a distinctive spiked helmet, as worn by the Arab Legion which policed the Transjordan desert where the troops were supposed to be training. It was intended to be the kind of clue that a military censor might miss, but that a sharp-eyed enemy intelligence officer would congratulate himself on spotting.
The airborne unit needed a name, and Clarke took it from a new outfit in England. The 11th Special Air Service Battalion had been formed out of troops that had parachute and glider training. Later in 1941 it would be renamed the 1st Parachute Battalion, becoming the basis of the modern Parachute Regiment. Over in Cairo, Clarke decided his paratroopers would be the 1st Special Air Service Battalion. It was a more significant decision than he appreciated at the time.
Helpfully to Clarke, the 11th Special Air Service Battalion was about to go into action – and, indeed, to descend on Italy. In early February, Operation Colossus saw them dropped into the south of the country to attack an aqueduct. Like other early Commando raids, the mission itself had what might politely be called mixed results: the aqueduct was hit but the paratroopers were captured. But it had effects on morale on both sides: the British now had forces who could, in theory, strike anywhere.
The final touch came in April, when Clarke borrowed two trustworthy soldiers from the Staffordshire Yeomanry, who were based in Palestine. Having been requested for ‘special escort duty’, Lance Corporal Smith and Trooper Michael Gurmin were met at Cairo station and taken to a secure barracks, where they were given their real mission. They were to remove their existing unit badges from their uniforms, and sew on new ones, including parachutists’ wings. ‘From tomorrow onwards you are to take the part of Lance Bombardier Smith and Gunner Gurmin,’ they were told, ‘of the First Special Air Service Battalion (Parachutists) and you must keep this up throughout your stay in Cairo.’
