The illusionist, p.7
The Illusionist, page 7
Back in 1941, just as Clarke was getting his new unit established in its new headquarters, everything changed.
Wavell had thought that the spring of that year might see further British advances, but Hitler had other ideas. Frustrated by the failure of his Italian allies, the Fuhrer ordered his generals to capture Yugoslavia and then move into Greece. Meanwhile, fearful of a total collapse in North Africa, he had dispatched one of his favourite generals with orders to shore up the Italian defences and stop them being pushed any further back. But the man he’d sent was never going to settle for that. By March, Erwin Rommel was ready to attack.
Chapter 8
On 24 February 1941, the new edition of Life magazine hit newsstands across America. Its striking cover image was of a group of soldiers standing at ease in the desert, dust on their boots, shirts open and sleeves rolled up, rifles lightly held, faces turned towards the sun. ‘ANZAC CONQUERORS’ was the caption. It was based on the mistaken assumption that the New Zealanders their photographer had persuaded to pose in Egypt had been fighting alongside Australian forces in Libya. In fact these young men had yet to see combat, though they would get plenty of it soon enough.
The bigger mistaken assumption was that the war in the desert was won. That day Winston Churchill signalled Wavell his approval for a plan to send the New Zealanders in the picture, along with 57,000 other troops, to reinforce Britain’s Greek allies, who had held off an Italian invasion but now faced a German one.
Also that day, a British patrol near Benghazi encountered something new to North Africa: a German tank unit. The patrol stood no chance: two scout cars, a truck and a car were destroyed, and the Germans took three prisoners. For the new German commander in Tripoli, it was an encouraging portent. ‘No casualties on our side,’ Rommel noted.
Wavell was aware that the Germans had arrived in Africa, but he had gone along with Churchill’s request to pull troops out of Libya and send them to Greece. Having seen the way the Italians fought, he was confident their troops could be discounted, and he didn’t feel the Germans were yet strong enough to manage a serious counter-attack on their own. It was a point on which the German high command agreed. In the middle of March, Rommel flew to Hitler’s headquarters, where he was told to sit tight until the end of May, when he would receive reinforcements, and could try to advance a little way, perhaps as far as Benghazi.
But Rommel wasn’t a man to sit around. He was a career soldier who knew how to get the best out of his troops. In the previous war, he had made his name as a daring infantry commander who was willing to attack much stronger forces, using innovative tactics so that his soldiers appeared where they were least expected and pulled off astonishing victories. Given command of a panzer division ahead of the German advance into France, he had pushed forward again and again, sometimes turning off his radio so that he couldn’t hear orders telling him to stop and consolidate. To Rommel, attacking was everything: you saw a weakness in the enemy’s line, and you threw your full strength at that point. Success came from spotting your opportunity and being bold enough to exploit it.
At the end of March, breaking his orders, and without waiting for reinforcements, he did just that. The Allied defenders were even weaker than he could have realised. It wasn’t just that troops had been pulled away to go to Greece. Those who were left had little or no battle experience. They were short of anti-tank guns. Tanks worn out by the drive west had been sent back to Cairo for repair and refitting. Those that remained often needed repair just as badly. The commander in the field who had swept the Italians from Cy-renaica had fallen sick, and his replacement had no experience of desert warfare. More fundamentally, the reason that the British had stopped where they had was that they had reached the limit of their supply lines.
The Germans meanwhile looked stronger than they were. Rommel had ordered his own fleet of dummy tanks built out of wood and canvas and fitted on top of cars – Wavell was no longer the only innovative general in North Africa. But even without this fake show, they were strong enough.
Wavell had known before the attack how vulnerable his forces were, and had given permission for them to fall back, but what followed looked a lot more like headlong flight than a fighting retreat. Rommel was overreaching in his assault, with his tanks forced to stop because they had run out of fuel. Had the Allies had a commander of his mettle, they might have seen this weakness and pushed the Axis forces back. Instead, they ran.
A week after Rommel launched his attack, Clarke was summoned back from his sick leave in Cyprus to see Wavell. Something was needed to stop, or at least slow down, the German advance. What could this new A Force do to give Rommel pause?
Wavell, who had yet to get the measure of his new opposite number, knew what the German ought to be worrying about: his supply lines. Nobody was more familiar than Wavell with the difficulty of supporting an army as it advanced across Cyrenaica. Clarke was ordered to persuade Rommel that an attack on his rear was imminent.
By this time Clarke had been in the deception business for all of three months. So far he’d run operations that had been conducted on his own terms and targeted at the Italian forces who, it was clear, were no match for the British. Now he was being asked to put together a plan on the fly, to deal with a far more dangerous enemy. In a year and a half of fighting, the German army had defeated the British army every time they’d met, and the current encounter was proving no different.
Such was the urgency of the situation that Clarke didn’t even bother with a codename for the operation he was sketching out. It became known as simply ‘Plan Anti-Rommel’ – ‘A-R’ for short. He tried to put himself in the mind of the German general. ‘Enemy probably knows we have a sea-borne expedition ready to launch against his coast somewhere,’ he began. ‘He will probably be nervous about his flanks and rear in any case. He probably even expects an attack on his communications before the end of April.’
Clarke wrote down all the units that might plausibly be able to threaten Rommel’s rear. It was a short list. There were some genuine Australian troops who hadn’t gone to Greece, and then there were the two false units he’d created: 10th Armoured Division and the 1st Special Air Service. The genuine SAS force was still in the future, at this point not even a gleam in David Stirling’s eye.
How could these be made threatening? Dummy gliders had been built for the SAS brigade. Clarke sent them to Crete, which was closer to western Cyrenaica than Cairo, to support the idea that airborne units were going to launch an attack far behind the lines. Apart from that, he was going to have to rely on rumours. With Wavell he came up with a list of stories that ought to give an advancing commander pause: that the 10th Armoured Division was advancing into the desert with a plan to attack the enemy flank and that Commandos newly arrived in Egypt and the SAS who were supposedly in Crete would both launch strikes deep into Libya to cut off Rommel’s supply lines.
He drew up a list of pieces of information he wanted passed to the enemy: ‘The 7th Division Guards Brigade went from Egypt to Cyrenaica on 6th April’; ‘6th Division Headquarters in Cairo were packing up on April 7th’; army officers had been drinking with their naval counterparts in the Continental Hotel and had been heard talking about ‘kicking the Boche in the pants’. The list went over several pages. Some of the items were true: 6th Division HQ were indeed packing up. Others weren’t.
The problem was getting these whispers over to the enemy. A press photo was released of new American tank equipment that was supposedly being supplied to British troops in Africa. London, Clarke had been told, had some sort of ‘special source’ for passing information to German intelligence. He sent a couple of items their way. The ever-reliable Japanese intelligence agent, Ohno, still seemed to trust his source on the Suez Canal, so information could be passed to him. The rest Clarke handed to Maunsell, to distribute as best he could.
Behind his desk at A Force HQ, Clarke pinned up a poster produced by the Ministry of Information. ‘PRACTICE AND PREACH SECURITY MINDEDNESS!’ it urged readers, under a series of cartoons of careless military men and their families making offhand remarks about their movements. Each piece of information was fed into the centre of the poster, where they were assembled into an accurate ‘Report From Spy HQ to Germany’. The lesson, for anyone who hadn’t already got it, was spelled out at the bottom: ‘Mind your own tongue – and check indiscretions in others.’
It was not one of the great wartime posters: cluttered, confusing and with a slogan that was the opposite of memorable. A later US poster would do a better job, showing a Nazi hand piecing together a jigsaw puzzle of words to spell out a message about a convoy. But what this one did very well was show the process that Clarke was trying to reverse-engineer. He started with the final report he wanted German intelligence to produce, then generated a list of facts that could lead to that conclusion, then produced pieces of gossip, things that might have been seen or overheard that would support those facts. ‘The actual messages will of course be passed in a much more devious form,’ he assured one of Wavell’s aides as he sought permission to go ahead with his plan.
The main flaw with the Ministry of Information’s poster, although no one knew it at the time, was that it was set in Britain. It featured nine different Nazi informants, all passing information to a spymaster. This was a fair reflection of the fears of British authorities, but it was far from the reality. German intelligence had no functioning spy network in the UK at the time, and the agents it was sending over were being rapidly picked up by MI5.
It was closer to reflecting the security situation in Egypt. Britain was an island, meaning agents had to be landed by boat or plane, both risky routes. A spy who wanted to travel to Egypt from neutral Turkey had only to get on the train.
And that was assuming they weren’t already there. Egypt was theoretically an independent country, but the British treated it in much the same way as a colonial possession. To officers such as Clarke, it probably felt like one.
But not everyone was happy about that. Many Egyptians resented the way the British treated them and reckoned that from Egypt’s point of view, a British defeat might be a good thing. Some of them were keen to pass secrets to the enemy, if they could find a way.
Then there were the supposed neutrals. Although Britain wasn’t yet at war with the Japanese, no one was under any illusions about whose side they were on. But diplomats such as Ohno were allowed to wander the country freely, noting the arrival and departure of ships and troops, listening to gossip in the bazaar.
And beyond those with ideological or patriotic motives for passing information to the enemy, there were plenty of people happy to make good money doing it. Everything else in Cairo was for sale, so why not secrets? Clarke’s confidence that gossip spoken too loudly in bars and waste paper carelessly discarded would find its way to enemy intelligence was well founded.
Magicians like Clarke’s uncle Sidney think a lot about ‘angles’: who can see which part of the stage from where. In rehearsals, assistants sit at the extreme corners of the auditorium to check that wires and secret compartments aren’t visible – and that the tricks are. Clarke’s problem was that he didn’t know exactly where the audience for his nuggets of fake intelligence was sitting. Maunsell’s team at SIME had a good idea about some enemy sources, but they had no reason to think they’d found all of them. Ultimately, Clarke’s audience could be anywhere.
From the perspective of ‘security mindedness’, Cairo was a nightmare, a mix of soldiers, alcohol, women and spies. But for a deceiver, it was an opportunity. Like a magician, a deceiver finds their work is pointless if no one is paying attention. Clarke was confident there was an audience in Cairo. It was now a question of making sure they were paying attention to the right (or, depending on your point of view, wrong) things.
The question was, were they? It was all very well spreading rumours in bars and hoping that they would make their way back to Berlin. What Clarke really needed was more solid ways of getting information to his audience.
As it turned out, whether or not Axis intelligence was paying attention to Clarke’s carefully drafted clues, Rommel wasn’t. While Clarke was pulling together his elaborate story and securing agreement for his various leaks, the Afrika Corps was charging across the desert, following much the same paths the British had taken four months earlier.
The kind of puzzle pieces that Clarke was passing over to Axis intelligence would need time to work their way through the system before anyone would assemble them into a picture. But Rommel wasn’t interested in waiting for that to happen. The best information he was getting about British forces came from his encounters with them.
A century earlier, the Duke of Wellington had talked about the importance of a commander being able to guess what he couldn’t see. This was a gift that Rommel possessed in spades. His experiences in the previous war and in France in 1940 had left him with an uncanny knack for drawing inferences about what he couldn’t see based on what he could. This was why his daring attacks so often delivered triumphs.
In the first few days of April he watched how the defenders responded to his advance. His men were taking prisoners by the hundred, and Rommel concluded that the defenders ‘intended to avoid, in any circumstances, fighting a decisive action’. He was like a poker player who had bluffed and found that his opponent didn’t dare call him. ‘It was a chance I could not resist,’ he said. He would keep up his pursuit.
On 11 April, three months after it had fallen to Australian troops, the city of Tobruk was once again under siege, this time by the Axis. Tobruk is the easternmost port on the Cyrenaica desert. Wavell feared that if Rommel took it he would be able to use it to bring up supplies almost to the Egyptian border. For Rommel, leaving it in British hands and pressing on to Egypt meant leaving an enemy toehold at his rear. He was determined that the city should be taken.
A Force officers suddenly found that their MI9 duties were urgent. One visited Tobruk to brief the defenders on escape and evasion techniques. It was well-meant, but an unfortunate clue to how commanders in Cairo viewed their likely fate.
And as this nightmare was unfolding on the southern side of the Mediterranean, another one was developing in the Balkans. The troops Churchill had ordered redeployed from Libya were enough to make Wavell weak, but not enough to make the Greeks strong. Over the course of April, the Germans swept through Yugoslavia and Greece. The forces that had arrived to help hold them off instead joined the general retreat, pulling back to Crete at the end of the month.
An A Force team had visited the island in the middle of the month to find a good location to display the dummy ‘SAS’ gliders when it became clear that there was no point in pretending the island was going to be a base for attacking anywhere else: it was about to be attacked itself. That part of Plan A-R was cancelled, and the gliders that were en route were destroyed when they arrived on Crete, to prevent German invaders discovering their existence.
Soldiers can be sceptical of the work of intelligence agencies, and with good cause. Reports are often based on out-of-date rumours and half-truths passed on by agents who have incentives to make the information they glean sound more important than it is. Even when they are accurate, they can be wrong: British codebreakers would read messages from Germany commanding Rommel not to advance and assume, incorrectly, that he would follow orders. They hadn’t understood that Rommel knew Hitler would forgive him disobeying instructions if the result was victories.
Clarke was trying to tell Rommel a story using rumours passed slowly through a variety of sources in Cairo. But Rommel, by now sporting a pair of sand goggles that he’d been given by a captured British officer, could see a different story with his own eyes. And Rommel was a bad target for the story Clarke was trying to tell him. As his forces reached Tobruk he ordered an assault even before they had scouted the city’s defences. This was not the behaviour of a man who would be persuaded to worry about what might go wrong. Neither was he a general inclined to spend time worrying about supply lines.
His subordinates warned him about the state of their vehicles, about shortages of fuel, about the condition of the road ahead, but Rommel was dismissive. ‘One cannot permit unique opportunities to slip by for the sake of trifles,’ he wrote, offering what might as well have been his motto.
Plan Anti-Rommel was an interesting idea, but a failure at every level. It wasn’t clear that the message reached German intelligence. Even if it had, there was no time for it to be processed, and even had the story got to Rommel, it wasn’t one he was interested in listening to. This was not a commander who was going to be persuaded to slow down for fear of over-extending himself, or indeed to be concerned with tedious details about supply logistics. For Rommel, destiny lay ahead of him, not behind. He could tell that the British were running away, and that was all the intelligence he needed. As a deceiver, Clarke hadn’t yet learned that he needed to know his audience.
It was a mark of how fast the war was changing that in mid-April Wavell suggested a new rumour, that he had laid ‘very extensive minefields’ inside the Egyptian border, including some that could be detonated remotely. Three weeks earlier he had felt secure. Now he feared Rommel was going to make it all the way to Cairo.
The Turk April–May 1941
The Magician brings onto the stage a large cabinet, at the back of which are a carved head and torso dressed in Ottoman robes and a turban. They open the door in the cabinet to show the mechanism underneath, and then place a chess board in front of the Turk, and invite members of the audience to challenge it to a game.
Chapter 9
At the end of April 1941, Clarke boarded a plane to Cyprus. He was wearing civilian clothes, and though his passport was in his real name, it was inaccurate in a crucial respect. Towards the back, a British official has written a message: ‘Holder of this passport is permitted to leave and enter Egypt freely so long as he remains holder of British War Correspondents Licence No 219.’ Clarke was pretending to be a journalist again, but this time, it wasn’t a joke.
