The illusionist, p.8
The Illusionist, page 8
After a night as the guest of the British governor on Cyprus, he boarded a civilian flight to Turkey. Travelling incognito, with only a letter from Wavell to the British ambassador in his pocket to confirm his covert mission, Dudley Clarke was now a secret agent.
In the desert, Rommel was stuck, still trying to take Tobruk. Just as the British had been three months earlier, he was now close to the limit of his supply lines. He was still confident that he could take Cairo, especially if he were given more troops and tanks. Germany had a large and powerful army which was just about to complete its conquest of Greece. Where better to send those men next than the desert, to run the British out of Africa and the Middle East as well?
Clarke was looking for new routes to get his story to the enemy. He and Wavell had agreed that he might be able to spread rumours supporting Plan Anti-Rommel in neutral Turkey. There was also work for him wearing his MI9 hat: British soldiers who hadn’t managed to join the main evacuation from Greece would be looking for other ways back to their own side, and Turkey was an obvious place to head.
After seeing the ambassador in Ankara, Clarke took the overnight train to Istanbul. It wasn’t his first visit to the city. That had been nearly twenty years earlier, when it had been known as Constantinople. He had been a spy that time as well.
The story Clarke told was that in 1922, on leave from the army, he had followed a whim to travel on the Orient Express, something he couldn’t really afford. He arrived in Constantinople with an empty wallet, and an idea of how to fix that problem. The British, who were supposed to be keeping the peace in the city, were facing Turks fighting to create an independent homeland, in a stand-off that threatened to become violent. Clarke, hoping to find an army cashier who could advance him money to pay his passage home, presented himself in civilian clothes at British headquarters on the pretext of offering his services as an officer. He claimed later that his hope was that he would simply be sent on his way with enough cash for a ticket.
Instead his offer was taken up, and he was asked to take a room at a boarding house whose owner was suspected of being a spy. Clarke quickly realised that his landlord was ‘living a double life in a state of near terror’, and began using him to pass misinformation to the Turkish forces.
This was clandestine work, out of uniform and in a foreign country. He was armed with a small Browning automatic pistol that he had brought with him for protection as he travelled through Eastern Europe. When he told the story decades later, it was with an amused detachment. But at the time, a young man thirsty for excitement and with a vivid imagination must have been conscious that he was following the footsteps of John Buchan’s fictional officer-spy, Richard Hannay, the hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps and other novels. Too closely at times. In a story that echoed Hannay’s adventures in Greenmantle, published six years earlier, Clarke said he at one stage found himself surrounded by an angry mob in Constantinople. He only escaped by claiming that he, too, was a Turkish nationalist.
Clarke’s account of this Constantinople adventure may have improved in the telling, but it’s clear that this had been his first taste of secret work, and he’d enjoyed it. The visit ended with him escorting a fleeing Turkish dignitary onto a Royal Navy ship in the night. The young lieutenant had found himself chatting over drinks with senior naval officers, some of them convinced that he was a far more important covert agent than he really was. It had been dangerous at times, but also fun, and Clarke liked having fun.
Now he had returned, a real intelligence officer on a real mission in a real war. Unlike Egypt, occupied and defended by the British, Turkey really was neutral. The previous war had led to the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the Turkish government had no desire to get involved in another senseless loss of life.
That made the country, like the other neutral nations of southern Europe, an ideal base for intelligence work by the fighting powers. The Abwehr, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, set up shop with the goal of building networks in the Middle East to gather information on the British forces there. For the British, meanwhile, it was a good spot from which to try to put feelers into the Balkans. Foreign correspondents, of the sort Clarke was pretending to be, also based themselves there. Just as it had done for the best part of a thousand years, Istanbul was serving as a crossroads and an information exchange between east and west.
Clarke checked himself into the luxurious Park Hotel. In itself, this was a bold act. The hotel was opposite the German consulate. Its restaurant and bars were known to be full of German spies. British agents tended to prefer the gloomier Pera Palace. But it was German spies that Clarke wanted to meet.
That evening, he kept an ‘unobtrusive rendezvous’ with a man whose name hinted at his unusual background.
Commander Vladimir Wolfson had been born into a Jewish family in Kyiv in 1903. His father, a lawyer, was wealthy enough to employ a Scottish governess, who taught her charges fluent English. In the chaos following the 1917 revolution, young Vladimir found himself invited onto a Royal Navy cruiser that had come to Odessa to rescue White Russians, to act as a translator. Whether he intended to leave with them or not, he was stuck on board when the city fell to the Red Army, and was taken onto the crew as a midshipman. From then on, he was ‘more English than any Englishman’. He attended Cambridge, married, and joined the Shell Oil company, which sent him to Palestine and Egypt. When war came, he was called back up and posted to Istanbul as ‘assistant naval attaché’. It was meant to sound unimportant. He was the man on the ground for the Naval Intelligence Division.
Wolfson talked Clarke through the situation in Istanbul. The Turkish police kept watch on foreign spies, but allowed them to go about their business so long as they didn’t spy on Turkey. The Abwehr had got around this by making spying on Turkey the job of its Bulgarian operation. The Istanbul station was left in peace to get on with spying on the Middle East.
The most straightforward job Clarke had for Wolfson was to run the local outpost of MI9, getting British troops out of Greece and shepherding them back to their own side. The next job was rather more surprising. Clarke wanted to get in touch with some Axis agents.
His goal was twofold: he had specific disinformation to spread as part of Plan A-R, but he also wanted to set up permanent channels for passing information to the enemy. His cover as a journalist was ideal for this. A decade and a half earlier, Clarke had spent a leave as a war correspondent for the Morning Post, covering the French fight against rebel tribesmen in Morocco, an episode that sounds less like Buchan and more like Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Camped out in a hotel with ‘a dozen or so’ reporters from a selection of nations, he’d learned the dirty secret of the press on assignment: the level of cooperation between people who are theoretically rivals: ‘We worked closely together, even pooling stories or methods of despatch at times.’
Even when they’re not sharing resources, reporters are tremendous gossips, exchanging information and observations as they try to work out what the story is. And though most are secretive when they have a scoop, there are some who just can’t stop themselves from sharing juicy stories. Clarke wanted to meet people who would either put his misinformation into the stories that they wrote or mention it to their Axis contacts, who might pass it on in turn.
Guided by Wolfson, it wasn’t difficult for Clarke, playing the part of a journalist recently arrived from Cairo, to join the gang of reporters who had, like the spies, settled on Turkey as a good spot from which to watch events in Europe and the Middle East.
There was an informal gathering of foreign correspondents – including Germans – each day at the Cafe Hatay, presided over by the Turkey correspondent of The Times. There Clarke met a Hungarian Jew who was writing for papers in Stockholm and Budapest. ‘He has been in London a good deal and is pro-British in sentiment, but mixes with Axis and American journalists,’ Clarke noted. ‘He would probably send to his papers anything which comes under the heading of news and would undoubtedly discuss it in journalistic circles of various nationalities.’
There was ‘a young and impetuous American who probably believes almost anything he is told’. He’d been in Berlin until the previous October, and was in the habit of meeting up with German and Japanese journalists. ‘He is essentially a news hound and will jump quickly at anything that looks like news.’
And there was a Swedish journalist who’d previously been in Berlin. ‘He has contacts in Axis circles and is talkative,’ Clarke wrote. ‘He is fond of the ladies and a frequenter of the brighter haunts of Istanbul.’ At least one person in the embassy believed that ‘news given to him would reach the enemy’.
It wasn’t just reporters that Clarke met. There was a Hungarian banker who had been educated in England and professed ‘strong British sentiments which may not be entirely genuine’. He was deemed ‘a useful contact in international circles’.
Clarke’s ‘channels’, as he called them, even included a carpet seller at the Grand Bazaar. ‘He is very talkative and inquisitive, asks innumerable questions and is only too happy to discuss any aspect of the war,’ Clarke said. ‘He is probably quite the best for spreading Bazaar rumours and for getting news to the Turks. He speaks excellent English and is a great football fan. He says that he is a member of the Arsenal and has played for them as a reserve. Anyone going into his shop and talking football can say anything they like.’
He went on, offering an insight into how he’d passed the time in the man’s shop: ‘If conversation flags he should be encouraged to show some erotic Persian pictures which will give ample time for talking.’ The war situation, Clarke said, always came up in these confidential chats.
Then there were those about whom he had no firm evidence, but some suspicions. ‘There is a little man belonging to the Iraq consulate, who looks like rather a fat edition of Charlie Chaplin. He haunts Tokatliyan Bar at about noon and 7 p.m., after which he is usually found in the Taxim Casino. He is not inclined to talk, but would probably pick up any documents which were dropped within his reach.’
In his imagined capacity as a reporter, Clarke had asked someone at his hotel to help him find a typist. The Russian woman who arrived was immediately suspect in his mind, simply as a result of being suggested by the staff at a hotel where the Abwehr had so much influence. ‘I have no reason to doubt her reliability,’ he said, but one of the hotel staff had found her, so it was possible she ‘may show papers to him or his associates.’ In Istanbul in 1941, it was safest to assume that everyone was working an angle.
Clarke spent three weeks in the city. In his account, no one guessed that he was anything other than what he claimed to be, a fellow scribbler and, to correspondents keen to hear the latest from the front, a man with fresh gossip. It’s also possible that some of them suspected he wasn’t quite right, but decided to play him along – someone who’s trying to mislead you can still be a source of information.
In either case, he gave them lots to work with. He suggested that any German advance into Egypt would be walking into a ‘well-prepared trap’. The British were ‘keeping back in Egypt a large reserve, including recently arrived armoured units’. He described the remote-controlled minefields that Wavell had suggested, too.
He speculated in a knowledgeable tone of voice that the recent flight to Scotland by Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, had followed a failed attempt to assassinate the Fuhrer. He even wrote ‘stories’ for his newspaper, presumably in the hope that someone would take a look at them, either his Russian typist, or another reporter, or one of the hotel staff.
Clarke and Wolfson didn’t stop at general rumours. They hatched a plan to put someone masquerading as a British traitor into direct contact with a German agent. It was still in the early stages when Clarke left. And they discussed a way to send fake stories in the name of journalists in Istanbul to their newspapers. Such subterfuge would of course be discovered when the false story appeared, so it was a high-risk approach. ‘This scheme will only be used for messages where speed of transmission is all important,’ Clarke wrote. ‘No one journalist should be used more than once but each Axis journalist can if necessary be used in turn.’
Before he left Istanbul, Clarke agreed a code he would use to signal the stories he wanted passed round in Turkey. Messages were already encrypted, but ciphers could be broken, and decrypted messages could be left lying around. So since the start of his deception work, Clarke had added another very simple layer of concealment. ‘The word “COUNTER” should be read as “ENCOURAGE”,’ he explained in a briefing note. ‘For instance, a message saying “PLEASE COUNTER LEAKAGES REGARDING” means “PLEASE ENCOURAGE LEAKAGES”.’
He agreed codewords he’d use if he wanted a particular channel to be deployed. ‘Chaplin’ was the man from the Iraqi consulate; ‘Hatay’ meant simply dropping a word in at one of the daily cafe chats.
Was any of this going to work? Clarke was putting a lot of faith in the idea that the Abwehr were listening to gossip from reporters, and that words dropped to hotel staff and merchants at the bazaar would find their way to enemy intelligence. If that sounded like the sort of thing that happened in novels or films, the reality was that there were no handbooks for intelligence officers in 1941. More than one read spy fiction hoping to find tips and tricks. Both Clarke and Wolfson were learning as they went along.
As it happened, two days after Clarke arrived in Istanbul to begin setting up his misinformation channels, another man arrived in the city on a parallel mission. He, too, was an adventurer and a performer, though a less respectable one than the English lieutenant colonel. He made his way to the building over the road from Clarke’s hotel, the German consulate, where he asked to speak to someone connected to the Abwehr. He was an agent just returned from Egypt, and he wished to make a report.
Chapter 10
Renato Levi was in his late thirties when he was invited to become a spy. Up to that point, his life hadn’t amounted to much. He’d been born into a prosperous Italian Jewish family in 1902, been raised between Bombay, where his family operated a shipyard, and Switzerland, where he was educated. He married an Australian and moved there for a decade before returning to Genoa with his wife and son in 1937. His mother owned hotels in the city, and he was supposed to help her run them, but she complained he wasn’t much help. Others saw something in him.
Just before Christmas 1939, he was approached by a tall, broad man, a little older than he was, named Hans Travaglio. He was, despite his surname, German, a jolly man, good company and generous. Levi liked him. After they had got to know each other a little, Travaglio asked an intriguing question: would Levi be interested in working for German intelligence?
Travaglio was no amateur spy. Weeks earlier, he had been involved in the first intelligence coup of the war, when he had pretended to be an anti-Nazi Luftwaffe officer in order to lure two officers of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, to a meeting in the town of Venlo, on the Dutch-German border, where they were abducted. The incident had thrown British intelligence into chaos, and put lives in danger: one of the MI6 men was, incredibly foolishly, carrying a list of agents’ names and addresses. So that Christmas the Abwehr and its man in Genoa were justly feeling pretty pleased with themselves.
What was it about Levi, such a disappointment to his mother, that caught Travaglio’s eye? Some of the characteristics that make a poor son might make for a good spy: a relaxed attitude to conventional morality, an aptitude for bluffing one’s way through life relying on charm. But it may have been as simple as the fact that, through his marriage and his time in Australia, Levi had picked up a British passport. At that point in the war, with Italy neutral and France unoccupied, this was a man who could travel to Britain easily.
Levi replied that he was indeed interested. However, he had ideas of his own. He sought out the British consul in Genoa and reported the approach. He claimed later he wanted to help the Allies because they were fighting the Germans, and the Germans hated Jews. But he was also a thrill-seeker, and this was an opportunity for excitement. And there seemed the possibility that there might be money to be made from this caper. As for the idea that it might be dangerous, Levi didn’t seem to give it much thought.
At the start of 1940, Travaglio dispatched his new recruit to Paris with a list of questions about the French military. There he was met by an MI6 officer, who passed him to France’s intelligence agency, the Deuxieme Bureau. It wasn’t a profitable relationship. The French didn’t seem to know how to use this new asset, and Levi ended up returning to Italy without the information he’d been asked to get. He decided to bluff it out, expressing outrage to his handler at the ridiculousness of his mission, a tactic that, somehow, worked. It probably helped that France had collapsed in the face of the German army, meaning his failure didn’t matter.
Besides, if Levi hadn’t yet been much of a success as an agent, he was proving his value to Travaglio in other ways. Abwehr officers were given dollars with which to pay their agents. Levi, however, knew black marketeers who would pay almost twice the official exchange rate for US currency. He and his new Abwehr colleagues saw a business opportunity. They would change the dollars into lira, pay the agents with those, and pocket the difference. It wasn’t always straightforward: Levi was arrested while trying to change thousands of dollars, and the Germans had to pull strings with the Italian police to get him released. But this spying game was proving just as profitable as Levi had hoped.
The Abwehr was now changing its focus, and Travaglio asked Levi if he would be willing to go to Egypt. Italy had entered the war, and the Abwehr were working with their Italian counterparts, the Servizio de Informazione Militare, known as the SIM. Its head signed off a plan where Levi and a wireless operator would travel to Cairo via Istanbul, and a wireless set would be sent for them in the diplomatic bag of a friendly country that still had an outpost in Cairo, probably Hungary.
