The illusionist, p.6
The Illusionist, page 6
Smith and Gurmin were issued with a briefing on the roles they were to play: how they had come to join the Special Air Service, and their training and travels since then. They were supposed to be in Egypt accompanying their commanding officer and awaiting further orders. At the end of their briefing came a special note: ‘The following is, of course, information that you would normally keep very secret. It may, however, be useful for you to note it so that you can let a word or two out if you get the opportunity.’ The details they were supposed to leak included the strength of their supposed unit and its armaments.
With that, the pair were sent out to enjoy themselves for four days, first in Cairo and then in Port Said, in the hope that they would be spotted by an Axis informant known to travel on the train – probably another Japanese agent. They had quite a time of it, visiting the pyramids, a football match, a cabaret, and going dancing. They ‘attracted an enormous amount of attention’, chiefly from fellow Allied soldiers but also from civilians and Egyptian officers. Under orders to be judiciously indiscreet, Smith and Gurmin chatted freely. ‘We answered a lot of questions,’ they reported back, ‘particularly going to Port Said, where an infantry company sergeant major and staff sergeant were very interested, so we told them a fair amount.’
Plan Abeam was an experiment, really. It had no great aim. But it showed Clarke’s approach. When Dominic West portrayed Clarke on TV, he described putting all the Abeam material together into a folder and leaving it in his briefcase where a Spanish attaché could find it. That was exactly the sort of blunt approach the real Clarke rejected.
Having worked out the story he wanted to tell in detail, he fed it piecemeal to the enemy by multiple routes. There were scraps of paper to collect, uniform badges to spot, an unusual helmet to pick out in a photograph. He left clues for enemy intelligence agencies to find and let them draw their own conclusion. By making them work for the story, he hoped to make them sell it to themselves. Anyone smart enough to notice a distinctive helmet in the background of a photograph would surely be so pleased with themselves that they’d be keen to believe the tale that it supported.
The problem with the experiment was finding out the results. Had any of these clues, so carefully distributed, made their way back to Italian intelligence? Had they been accepted, and if so, had they been put together as Clarke intended? He had no way of knowing. There were encouraging signs: in June Clarke was delighted to receive a report of gossip going round Cairo that any parachutists spotted dropping near the city would be British. (In fact, they would be British dummies: that week the RAF had dropped several to the south of the city to simulate SAS soldiers in training.) The story that a parachute unit was present in Egypt was now definitely in the public domain.
But it would be months before he was handed captured documents showing the enemy listing a parachute battalion among the British forces in the Middle East.
Abeam’s most significant legacy came that July. At the start of the year, 2,000 Commandos had sailed for the Middle East, with ideas that they might be useful to Wavell. But here too, the military hadn’t really known what to do with this large raiding party, and the unit had broken up. Among its frustrated members was a lieutenant in the Scots Guards, David Stirling. He, like Clarke, believed that the Commando idea was a good one that had been badly implemented. The key, he felt, was to keep things small and nimble.
Lying in hospital after a trial parachute jump that had gone wrong, Stirling had time to consider how things might be done differently. One of his visitors was Clarke, who had got to know Stirling well since he arrived in Cairo. Clarke liked to hold court in Shepheard’s, where he now had a permanent room. Many officers congregated in the Long Bar, where women were banned. Amazingly, they took this to mean that it was a safe place to discuss secrets. The joke was that you could learn whatever you needed to about the British forces in the Middle East simply by standing there for an evening. Clarke liked to position himself somewhere where he had a wall at his back and a view of the door, a habit from his days on a Palestinian death list.
Tall, posh – he came from one of Scotland’s great families – and charming, Stirling fitted well into Clarke’s gang of chaps who had creative thoughts about warfare. Few, if any of them, knew exactly what it was that Clarke did, only that it was something secret. ‘Nobody could poke into what he was doing, because he’d retort by telling funny stories about something quite different,’ recalled one. ‘He was so pleasant to meet that he could get away with that.’ For all his congeniality, there was a separateness about Clarke, a way in which he was closed off from those around him. Much later, one of his friends would describe him as someone who could be alone in a crowd.
As Stirling recovered in hospital, Clarke talked to him about the Commandos. He was still sure there was merit in the original idea. The important thing, in his view, was fostering independent-mindedness in soldiers. Much of military life seemed to aim at achieving just the opposite. ‘Nearly every conception of guerrilla warfare was opposed to all the British soldier had ever been taught.’ Ordinary soldiers, Clarke explained, were stuck with their officers, whereas a guerrilla chose the band he would join. The only discipline that should be necessary for an elite soldier was the threat of being returned to their regular unit.
The mistake Clarke had made with the Commandos was trying to build a large force under the eyes of the War Office in London: so many senior people had got involved that it became impossible to do anything. Out here in Cairo, far from the eyes of officials, it was possible to experiment.
Stirling proposed putting together a much smaller outfit – just fifty soldiers initially. Clarke, one of the few people he confided in, encouraged him. This unit would be much closer to the original vision of the Commandos. It would certainly be independent-minded. Without much support from the hierarchy in Grey Pillars, Stirling’s men would have to ‘borrow’ supplies from other units.
Clarke was happy to put a word in for his friend, and he had the ear of the commander-in-chief. He also had a contribution of his own. It would be helpful, he said, if Stirling’s new unit was called the Special Air Service, as this would put flesh on the bones of Abeam, rewarding any Axis intelligence officers who had followed the trail of clues. As an additional touch, he suggested calling the first recruits ‘L Detachment’, implying the existence of detachments A to K.
The Special Air Service that was made flesh by Stirling bore almost no resemblance to the unit that Clarke had sketched out in Abeam. It was far smaller, and after its first attempt to drop behind the lines by parachute ended in disaster, it stayed out of the air. But it was completely in the spirit of what he’d imagined the Commandos would be: little teams of men with ‘dash’ who thought for themselves, attacked out of nowhere and then disappeared.
In the years since its formation, the SAS, as it is now universally known, has shown a keen understanding of the advantage of creating a legend about itself. To this day it has a policy of neither confirming nor denying stories about its actions, allowing it to be, in people’s minds, everywhere and nowhere, a terrifying force that might strike at any moment. So it is fitting that it took its name from a fictitious unit created to scare the enemy.
It was also appropriate that among Stirling’s early recruits was one of Clarke’s two fake SAS men, Michael Gurmin.
The SAS wasn’t the only descendant of the Commandos. In the middle of January 1941, as Clarke was putting together Abeam and implementing Camilla, he was invited to meet William Donovan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s unofficial envoy to the British, who was on a fact-finding tour of the Mediterranean.
Clarke was the ideal person to charm and impress him: a natural storyteller, he was in his element sipping cocktails on the terrace of the Continental Hotel, revealing some secrets, keeping others. Equally Donovan, a well-connected former soldier whose exploits in the First World War had won him the nickname ‘Wild Bill’ and been the subject of a James Cagney movie the previous year, was exactly the sort of American that the status-obsessed Clarke was eager to meet. Among the subjects they covered was guerrilla warfare.
Donovan had liked the sound of the Commandos, and believed the US would soon need a similar force. Five days later the men met again to discuss the subject in more detail, and Clarke promised to draft a paper on his experiences. Apologising for knowing nothing about the US Army except for what he’d learned from his hours in the cinema, Clarke set out the approach he’d taken, and offered some proposals for a US force. He emphasised the importance of choosing a name with ‘an adventurous sound, with historic associations, and above all an essence of the offensive spirit about it. “Rangers” might be a possibility.’
The US Army Rangers were formed in 1942, becoming America’s first modern elite unit. They were consciously modelled on the Commandos, and early recruits trained and fought alongside them. Most American historians do not accept that the unit’s name came from Clarke, but he determinedly claimed the credit, saying he’d named two of Britain’s elite forces, as well as one of America’s.
It was a good boast to make, but Clarke had contributed more than names. His vision of turning regular soldiers into guerrillas who could fight independently and strike far behind the enemy lines lives on in today’s special forces units. It’s no coincidence that the green beret adopted by Britain’s Commandos during the war became the symbol of elite troops around the world. It’s not hard, either, to see shades of the Commandos in the guerrilla activities of the US Office of Strategic Services, which Donovan would found months later, and which would grow into the Central Intelligence Agency.
The creation of the Commandos, the SAS and the Rangers was the work of many hands, but those who had been at the heart of things understood Clarke’s contribution. ‘Very much a pro,’ Stirling said, citing Clarke’s important influence on his thinking. ‘He championed the independent company concept.’ The general who led the Commandos for the final years of the war was even clearer in a 1945 letter to Clarke: ‘If it had not been for your activities, the Green Beret would never have seen the light of day.’
I. Lieutenant General Philip Neame, who had the distinction, held to this day, of being the only person to have won both a Victoria Cross (for throwing bombs, Neuve Chapelle, 1914) and an Olympic gold medal (for shooting rifles, Paris, 1924).
Chapter 7
While Clarke was finding his feet as a deceiver in Cairo, the most important work in the deception field was being done 500 miles to the city’s west, as Wavell’s forces continued to pursue the Italians across the Libyan desert. Britain’s 10th Royal Tank Regiment had been formed following the army’s initial breakthrough in December. It ought to have been of limited fighting value as its tanks were made of wood and canvas. When they wanted to move, they were folded up and packed onto lorries. But sometimes, it turned out, wood and canvas was enough. The 10th joined the troops preparing to attack the town of Mechili, only for the Italians to flee during the night, convinced of the overwhelming strength of the British armour. In reality, the Italians had 300 fighting tanks to Britain’s 50.
The advancing British forces were coming to terms with one of the realities that would dominate the next two years: the way the desert wore down machines. Sand and grit got everywhere, sitting inside mechanisms and grinding away the moving parts of engines and guns. The poor roads and worse off-road conditions wore away at suspensions, tyres and tracks. As armies advanced, they stretched their supply lines, up which everything from water and fuel to spare parts and ammunition had to be carried: the one certainty of the desert was that it would yield nothing to help them. The very trucks that carried the supplies suffered the same attritional damage as the advancing tanks.
Even fake tanks weren’t immune, it turned out. The wood warped in the heat. The parts were damaged by repeated packing and unpacking. In mid-February, the 10th, its tanks literally falling apart, was disbanded.
But back in Cairo, Clarke had come up with a way to create extra tanks that would never wear out. New machines from Britain were still months away, but perhaps the enemy could be convinced they had already arrived.
When the magician fans out the cards in their hand and flashes them briefly at the audience, the implication is that it’s a full deck, but who has time to count them? Who even tries? They say it’s a deck of cards, and they’re definitely holding cards.
The 3rd Indian Motor Brigade had just arrived in Egypt. It didn’t have tanks, or anti-tank guns. In fact it was mainly armed with rifles. But it had trucks, and the word ‘motor’ in its name. Clarke spread rumours in Cairo that it was part of the 10th Armoured Division. That implied the existence of two other brigades, and a lot of tanks. No one saw the tanks, but the 3rd Indian’s trucks might function as proof of their presence.
Clarke would now learn that Egypt was as hard on men as it was on equipment. In early February, he fell sick with jaundice, a common disease among troops in the Middle East, the result of poor sanitation. He was hospitalised for three weeks, a frustration for a man with a mind as active and fertile as Clarke’s. Maunsell visited him almost every day to discuss rumours that they could propagate to the enemy, but compared to the frenetic level of activity Clarke had sustained in his first two months in the job, there was little output. Even after his discharge, he was still weak, and he was sent to Cyprus to recuperate.
Having satisfied himself that there was work to be done in deception, Clarke was now arguing that he needed more staff. The fact that everything had ceased while he was sick had shown the danger of leaving it all to one man.
His masters agreed, and Clarke was allowed to begin building a team. The unit would need a name. This would necessarily have to be misleading – he couldn’t very well call it the Deception Section – and characteristically, he decided he might as well put some more flesh on the bones of his imaginary SAS unit. Its main headquarters were supposed to be in Transjordan, so he would suggest that his unit was the local branch, the ‘Advance Headquarters, “A” Force’ – hoping curious minds would guess that A stood for ‘Airborne’. It didn’t hurt that ‘A Force’ had a pleasingly glamorous sound to it.
Turning to staff, he had heard there was a secretary in Grey Pillars who had won a gold medal for her skills. This made her, by Clarke’s reckoning, the best typist in England. It was typical of him both that he decided he had to have her working for him, and that he managed to get her. It was typical, too, that the rest of his recruits were particular types of chap. You didn’t need to have gone to Eton and Oxford to join A Force, but it did seem to help.
Clarke, of course, had attended neither, and as with his recruitment of David Niven back in London, there were signs here of insecurity on his part. The lifestyle he aspired to – flat in Mayfair, cocktails at the Ritz, dinner at the Savoy – was that of an aristocratic officer in one of the army’s more socially exclusive regiments, a cavalryman, say. He could afford it because of his father’s money, but that wealth had been self-made, rather than inherited with a title and an estate. And though Clarke palled around Cairo with the officers of the Eleventh Hussars – now riding armoured cars, rather than horses – he was himself an artilleryman, even if he still wore his Flying Corps wings. In a subtle way that perhaps only an Englishman of his generation could understand, this consummate insider was also an outsider.
Finally, Clarke wanted a new office. He needed to talk to intelligence sources, and inviting someone into Grey Pillars created the risk that they would take away more information than they had brought in. He was allowed to lease two flats on Sharia Kasr-El-Nil, convenient for two of the city’s most fashionable spots, Groppi’s coffee shop and the Mohammed Ali social club. The block had been a high-class brothel, and Clarke was happy for the business to continue on the upper floors. The arrangement worked well. Neither set of tenants wanted to advertise what they were up to, and both saw that guests who wanted to avoid questions now had a plausible alibi for visiting. A Force did occasionally, to their general delight, have to deal with confused soldiers who had arrived in search of a good time. There is no record of how the brothel dealt with lost visitors wanting to discuss military deception.
There remained the question of how to explain all this to the curious. It was easy to say that members of A Force should simply not discuss their work, but like a good illusionist, Clarke understood the importance of diversion.
When Wavell had appointed Clarke to his staff, he had given him responsibility for various ‘undefined secret activities’, including being the local representative of MI9. This covert organisation had been set up at the start of the war, to assist British soldiers behind enemy lines in evading capture and helping those who had been caught to escape.
Although it meant more work, to Clarke’s devious mind it had an advantage: if people wanted to know what he was up to, his MI9 work could be offered as a ‘useful cloak’ to conceal his main work. He was deceiving about his deception, using a secret to cover a bigger secret. It was Clarke all over.
It wasn’t simply a cover. There isn’t room here to tell the story of the Middle East branch of MI9 under Clarke’s command. Some numbers will have to do the job instead. Between 1941 and 1945 it helped in the rescue of 2,807 Allied personnel from behind enemy lines, as well as roughly 9,000 Greeks and 94 Poles. And close to a million service personnel were given escape and evasion training. As with the Commandos, if Clarke had done nothing but oversee MI9, he could have been considered to have had a very good war.
As the war went on, Clarke developed some informal rules: he recruited no male officers below the rank of major, unless they’d proved themselves by being wounded or winning a medal, and he wouldn’t let female officers direct clandestine operations – these were often on the MI9 side – fearing they would fall in love with the men they were sending into the field.
