Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  Due circumstantial evidence was provided. There were audible signs that a great concentration of British guns were cautiously registering, west of Lens. A little scuffle on that part of the front elicited from our side an amazing bombardment – apparently loosed in a moment of panic. I fancy a British Staff Officer’s body – to judge by the brassard and tabs – may have floated down the Scarpe into the German lines. Interpreted with German thoroughness, the maps and papers upon it might easily betray the fact that Lens was the objective.*

  Then an apparently indiscreet general in ‘one small edition of one London paper’ blabbed that the British push was aimed at Lens and a supposedly outraged MP asked a question in the House of Commons about greater control of the press. Montague believed that deception worked: ‘The Germans kept their guns in force at Lens, and their counter barrage east of Ypres was so much the lighter, and our losses so much the less.’ But Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson in their authoritative study of the battle, Passchendaele: the Untold Story, disagree. Their assessment is brutal: ‘Haig’s deception plan, in sum, seemed to have the capacity only to deceive Sir Douglas himself.’

  Other kinds of tricks were going on behind British lines. The enemy dead yielded much useful information: their diaries, documents, maps, letters, pay books, photographs, postcards, identity discs and shoulder straps, even the markings on their weapons and kit, could all help intelligence fill out the ‘order of battle’, the identifying of enemy units and formations. But you could learn even more from living prisoners of war. Hundreds of thousands of Germans were captured in the Great War, and many gave away much more vital knowledge than their name, rank and number. This was not always achieved through formal interrogation. The sympathetic approach often worked well: a chair, a cigarette and a friendly chat with someone who took no notes seemed harmless enough. The boastful could be drawn out with appreciation, the quiet ones coaxed to unburden themselves. Away from the interrogation rooms, the holding cages and cells were also wired for sound with concealed microphones and fluent German-speakers eavesdropping via listening-sets. And there were stool pigeons:

  A ‘pigeon’ was a renegade German or an Englishman speaking perfect German, dressed up in German uniform and introduced into an assembly of prisoners in order to ‘direct their conversation into the proper channel’. The ‘pigeon’ would proceed to talk of forthcoming operations, or of losses, or of food and discipline or of anything else upon which he had been primed beforehand by the British Intelligence staff.

  Once, in 1915, a wounded German officer was captured at Ypres and taken to hospital in Poperinghe … he refused to open his lips. Subterfuge was thereupon resorted to. A British officer, posing as a wounded German officer, was carried into the cot adjacent to that occupied by the genuine German. The camouflaged officer had his head shaved in the approved Teuton style and his arm and leg all bandaged up and in splints. And so the two were left next to one another through the night. The real German moaned; the camouflaged German followed suit. The real German asked, ‘Sind Sie Deutscher?’ The camouflaged German replied: ‘Yawohl. Bin auch offizier.’ The camouflaged German didn’t encourage conversation; he was morose and taciturn …

  These stories come from The Secret Corps: A Tale of ‘Intelligence’ On All Fronts, written by Captain Ferdinand Tuohy, former head of the GHQ wireless service. In chapter 6, ‘The Brain War’, Tuohy berated the infuriating slowness of the intelligence system in grasping the importance of deception:

  To begin with, one concentrated almost entirely on finding out what the enemy was doing. In the next phase, one took measures to prevent the enemy finding out what you were doing. Finally, one saw to it that the enemy was thoroughly well deceived and hoodwinked into making false deductions. This final development of ‘Intelligence’ will rule supreme in any future war …

  Tuohy thinks this initial slowness was because the British General Staff gave up all ideas of tactical surprise after the failed attack of Neuve Chapelle in spring 1915. He says plans for deception operations were still being rejected in 1916. But by the middle of 1918, deception was standard practice at GHQ in France.

  Memoranda from Lieutenant General Herbert Lawrence, Chief of the General Staff, sent out in August and September 1918 show that deception could only begin to succeed against the enemy when the British got a complete grip on their wireless security (by, for example, changing call signs daily) and began sending the fake chatter and ‘dummy traffic’ that they wanted the Germans to hear; when they started going through all the motions of physical camouflage in unnecessary places; and when they supplied false information to their own troops as well as the enemy, so anyone captured would, quite sincerely, reveal consistent chaff.

  The most advanced example of this kind of thinking comes from the final three weeks of WW1, in a memorandum on ‘Security’ by Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen for Brigadier General, General Staff, GHQ, Intelligence, dated 23 October 1918. The usual counter-espionage sense of ‘security’ is preventing the enemy finding out about you. This entails keeping documents safe, stopping leakages from wireless and telephone, and instructing all ranks how to behave when captured (i. e., after giving the required name, rank and number, repeating ‘I cannot say’ to questions.) It also entails warning your own men about some of the devious methods employed by the enemy to extract information.

  Meinertzhagen, however, had his own novel definition of security. He thought the aim of security went well beyond ‘preventing the enemy divining our real plan’, and was actually ‘feeding him with sufficient material to induce him to believe he is in possession of our real plan’. In his parlance, ‘security’ means ‘deception’, as in ‘Security feeds the enemy with material served up in as acceptable form as possible.’ And when he writes that ‘badly prepared camouflage will have the same effect on a trained Intelligence Officer [at enemy HQ] as badly served food – it will be refused or if accepted will not be digested’, the word ‘camouflage’ now means ‘disinformation’.

  He saw the kind of physical camouflage done by Royal Engineers at Special Works Parks as ‘negative camouflage, i. e., camouflage designed to conceal information, inanimate objects or troops from the enemy’. In the Meinertzhagen view ‘positive camouflage’ is whatever is ‘designed to carry false information to the enemy’, as well as ‘to our own troops and indeed to the world in general’. Meinertzhagen thought it essential that ‘positive camouflage’ – deception – ‘be controlled by the one brain’ at GHQ and then filtered down through Armies, Corps, Divisions, Brigades etc. He summarised the various forms of ‘positive camouflage’ under the following headings:

  (a) Construction of aerodromes, hospitals, hutments, railway sidings, gun positions, dumps, etc. As far as resources permit, camouflage of this description should be real, but when dummy work has to be introduced, it must be designed to deceive our own troops as much as the enemy.

  The R. A. F. should be constantly asked to report on all such work.

  (b) The spreading of false news by various means.

  (c) Wireless, Power Buzzer and telephone camouflage. Both dummy messages and degrees of activity have in the past proved useful camouflage weapons.

  (d) Troops and transport movement, attitude and dispositions of troops of all arms, railway activity and great aerial or A/A [anti-aircraft] gun display: Artillery registration.

  (e) Preparation of maps and documents designed to deceive the enemy and deliberately allowed to fall into the enemy’s hands or enemy agent’s hands.

  Not for another five decades would the full extent of Meinertzhagen’s commitment to deception, both in private and in public, emerge.

  Like Bernard Shaw, C. E. Montague understood that the morality of war was not the morality of peace, ‘so you may stainlessly carry deception to lengths which in peace would get you blackballed at a club and cut by your friends’. He felt, however, that the British, in their amateurish gentlemanly way, were still half-hearted about using the press to deceive. Montague fantasised
what whole-hearted use of this weapon would be like:

  If we really went the whole serpent the first day of any new war would see a wide, opaque veil of false news drawn over the whole face of our country. Authority playing on all the keys, white and black, of the Press as upon one piano, would give the listening enemy the queerest of Ariel’s tunes to follow. All that we did, all that we thought, would be bafflingly falsified … The whole sky would be darkened with flights of strategic and tactical lies so dense that the enemy would fight in a veritable ‘fog of war’ darker than London’s own November brews …

  Montague thought that during WW1 ‘the art of Propaganda was little more than born’. He wondered what would be the long-term effects of another war in which propaganda had really come of age, ‘and the State … used the Press, as camouflaging material, for all it was worth’. He reckoned ‘a large staff department of Press Camouflage’ would be needed: ‘The most disreputable of successful journalists and “publicity experts” would naturally man the upper grades.’ Argument and reason would be replaced by emotion and ‘the practice of colouring news, of ordering reporters to take care that they see only such facts as tell in one way’. The moral downside of it was that the untruthful journalist, the ‘expert in fiction’, having gained high distinction by his ‘fertility in falsehoods for consumption by an enemy’, would continue to thrive after the war was won, in ‘that new lie-infested and infected world of peace’.

  On 10 February 1918, Buchan’s Department of Information became the Ministry of Information. The energetic Canadian Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, proprietor of the Daily Express, became Minister of Information, and had a seat in Lloyd George’s cabinet. Max was clear about his new role:

  The Ministry of Information is the Ministry of publicity abroad. Its business is to study popular opinion abroad and influence it through all possible channels, of which the chief is the overseas press. Its object is to state the British case to the world.

  Of course, this was done differently from official diplomacy. For the press baron, ‘The Ministry of Information represents the democratic and the popular side of the Foreign Policy’, so he used journalists and writers in the work. Rudyard Kipling was often asked for personal advice by Beaverbrook, although he was never officially employed in a propaganda capacity as he was felt to be too fierce and vengeful a ‘Hun-hater’ for public consumption. Buchan rose to Director of Intelligence. Of supplying information to neutrals, he minuted:

  The department must work to a large extent secretly, and as far as possible through unofficial channels. Camouflage of the right kind is a vital necessity. It can advertise its wares, but it dare not advertise the vendor.

  Beaverbrook’s biggest coup was landing Lord Northcliffe as the Director of Propaganda in Enemy Countries, reporting directly to the Prime Minister and the War Cabinet. Northcliffe’s organisation came to be known as ‘Crewe House’ after the Marquess of Crewe placed his splendid residence of that name in Curzon Street, London, at their disposal.

  The man who organised, recruited and ran Crewe House was Sir Campbell Stuart. In February 1918 he was charged with putting together a team to produce and distribute propaganda to the Central Powers. His managing committee included the editor of the Daily Chronicle, the foreign editor of The Times, the managing director of Reuters news agency and the celebrated novelist H. G. Wells. What was even more impressive in Whitehall terms were the links Crewe House made with other government departments to ensure smooth delivery. These included a healthy line of credit with the Treasury; full co-operation from HM Stationery Office who printed millions of leaflets in myriad foreign languages; ample use of the Ministry of Information wireless service; and full-time dedicated go-betweens to the War Office and the Air Ministry, the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, the director of Naval Intelligence, and the director of Military Intelligence.

  Collaboration with the secret world was necessary for distributing the millions of cartoons, leaflets and pamphlets that Crewe House produced. At first RFC planes were used, but they did not have a satisfactory means of scattering the sheets, and after two leaflet-disseminating planes were shot down and their pilots given long terms in prison for spreading seditious messages, the War Office changed tack. Military Intelligence (MI7) had regularly been using large hydrogen balloons to get agents and crates of carrier pigeons into enemy territory at night, and now they used thousands of smaller balloons to deliver paper eastwards on the wind. Some 2,000 hydrogen balloons of specially ‘doped’ paper, about twenty feet in circumference, were produced every week. Each could carry up to 1,000 leaflets, which ones depending on that night’s wind direction:

  The leaflets were sewn onto a slow-burning fabric fuse, which was ignited before launching. As the fuse burnt, the leaflets fell off one by one, thus serving as ballast. For the first hour or so the fuse carried leaflets designed for German troops, then some hours of leaflets for friendly civilians and, finally, leaflets for German civilians. On every suitable night millions of these leaflets were despatched by teams strung along our front line.

  The Inner Circle: The Memoirs of Ivone Kirkpatrick

  Late in the war, many British propaganda leaflets went by internal post all over Austria, Bavaria and Germany, thus avoiding the strict censorship of foreign mail. This happened in two ways. First, they were smuggled in bulk via the book trade, which was not closely supervised, especially if the volumes had the covers of German classics. Second, they were carried over the border from neutral Holland by Gastarbeiter and sent via the normal post inside enemy territory to neutrals, potential sympathisers, the intelligentsia and the newspapers, using counterfeit postage stamps engraved and printed by Waterlow of Watford for one of the British secret services.

  Production of propaganda was split into three enemy areas: Austro-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Germany. Northcliffe was persuaded by H. Wickham Steed, the foreign editor of The Times, that the dual monarchy of Austria and Hungary was the weakest link in the chain of the Central Powers, and therefore the first place to start hammering. This was because the sprawling Habsburg Empire contained many peoples and nationalities who were potentially pro-Ally. ‘There are thus in Austria-Hungary, as a whole, some 31,000,000 anti-Germans, and some 21,000,000 pro-Germans’, wrote Northcliffe. ‘The pro-German minority rules the anti-German majority.’

  On 24 February 1918, Northcliffe asked Lord Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, for a clarification of inter-Allied political attitudes towards the Habsburg Emperor’s dynasty and the ethnic minorities he ruled. Clearly, policy had to precede propaganda: he needed a clear line to follow. Balfour agreed four days later that ‘a propaganda which aids the struggle of the nationalities, now subject to Austrian Germans or to Magyar Hungarians, towards freedom and self-determination, must be right’. It was the continuation of the divide-and-rule strategy formerly directed against the Ottoman Empire.

  So, in early April 1918, H. Wickham Steed and another member of Campbell Stuart’s team, the academic Dr R. W. Seton-Watson, were in Italy, attending the three-day Congress of Oppressed Habsburg Nationalities in Rome where Italians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Rumanians found common cause in ‘the right of peoples to decide their own fate’. Six months before, the Italian front at Caporetto had buckled under a surprise attack by the Austrians. A hundred thousand Italians had been taken prisoner and 700 guns lost in the retreat. Now the tide was turning. Steed and Seton-Watson set up a polyglot printing press at Reggio Emilia. It published a weekly news journal and patriotic and religious leaflets in six languages which were fired across the trenches by mortar, rocket and rifle-grenade, dropped by aeroplane, and even thrown by contact patrols of ardent deserters who volunteered for the task. Troops of doubtful loyalty were assailed across no-man’s-land by loudspeaker propaganda and gramophone records playing Czecho-Slovak and southern Slav songs. Deserters began coming across, carrying the leaflets, singly or in groups. Some Czech troops mutinied. The Austro-Hungarian milita
ry authorities were further alarmed when the Italian fightback started from June.

  From May to July 1918 the director of propaganda literature against the Germans was H. G. Wells, the imaginative and largely self-educated author of many successful books, including The History of Mr Polly and the WW1 novel Mr Britling Sees it Through in which a grieving father seems to find God. When he joined Crewe House, Wells agreed that policy had to be clarified before any positive propaganda could begin, and he urged ‘a clear and full statement of the war aims of the Allies’. Typically, he wanted an ideal vision of the future, something people could believe in after the war. ‘The thought of the world crystallises now about a phrase “The League of Free Nations”.’ He wanted to hold out a beacon of hope, the dream of perpetual international peace. Wells believed in this ideal but thought the British government was cynical about it. ‘We were in fact decoys. Just as T. E. Lawrence of the “Seven Pillars” was used all unawares as a decoy for the Arabs.’

  Though they came from his department, Wells did not personally write the texts of the British-produced German-language propaganda leaflets that showered down on Germany in such quantities (over ten million in the last three months of the war). These aimed to inspire fear rather than hope, and they were demoralising because they were true: reminders of shortages and social problems, maps and diagrams of lost ground and military defeats against inexorable Allied success, graphic depictions of growing American strength, name lists of dead and captured German U-boat commanders, pictures of happy smiling Germans who had given up and were not being tortured, the surrender of Bulgaria in September.