The dream of every commander has always been to achieve complete surprise over hisenemy … Camouflage is merely one factor of surprise. It means deceiving the eyes of the enemy.
Alan Moorehead thought the war correspondents did well in the desert because the issues were simpler. ‘There were no distractions, no cities, no railroads, shops, cinemas, markets, farms, children or women … We never saw money or crowds or animals or hills and valleys. We saw the arching sky and the flat desert stretching away on every side.’ The small incident achieved a significance here that it would not elsewhere because they saw it clearly and in isolation. For the camoufleurs too, the uncluttered empty desert behind the coastal strip was a bare stage where everything could be seen, which also made it ‘an ideal place for … the cunning substitution of real for false and vice versa’. This was true, of course, for both sides.
When the actorish German Colonel General Erwin Rommel arrived in Libya to rescue the Italians from total collapse, the first thing he did on 12 February 1941 was march his German troops three times round the same palace at Tripoli so his limited forces could make a bigger show for the Propaganda Kompanie newsreel cameras. Then the man later admiringly nicknamed ‘the Desert Fox’ by the British got Italian workmen to start building and fitting 200 dummy tanks on the chassis of old cars to augment his Panzers. Rommel was an aficionado of feints and deception, and knew display and presentation mattered in this theatre where men could make mirages. Basil Liddell Hart, editor of The Rommel Papers, compares him to Lawrence of Arabia in his thinking about unorthodox warfare. Rommel was also acutely visual: he liked to sketch out his battle plans with coloured crayons and used to fly up in a plane to survey the terrain ahead and to take photographs.
Barkas was sure that German visual intelligence was as highly organised and scientifically equipped as the British, employing Luftwaffe aerial reconnaissance, photographic interpretation and all the usual means of observation. Training at Farnham, the British camoufleurs had looked at infrared photos taken from above Stonehenge that still showed evidence of stones being moved thousands of years ago. They knew the lessons of WW1: armies left distinctive messes wherever they went. The patterns of their organisation and behaviour scrawled signatures on the ground which photoreconnaissance interpreters read like spoor. Barkas knew that few of these signs could be concealed, but some could be disguised if only units would alter their behaviour. What appealed to him now was ‘an aggressive, ambushing use of camouflage as part of the plan of battle’. On the long drive back along the coast, he began to think about using camouflage not just as a passive technique of hiding but as an active performance of misleading display:
The greatest and most respected of military commanders have usually been masters of fraud … All generals do their best to mystify the enemy by false threats or movements. But unless they have at their disposal something in the nature of a travelling circus, these deceptive manoeuvres must be carried out by real units at a considerable cost.
Barkas saw his camouflage unit as just that ‘travelling circus’, a sort of ‘5% army’ ready to construct whatever impression the Commander might wish to present. Engineers realistically simulating the kind of mess that real armies make would be doing ‘film production on the grand scale’. In a place of sharp light that threw long shadows, what would work best were 3-D dummies and decoys.
Geoffrey Barkas began with a half-share in a trestle table in the despatch rider’s room, a space even smaller than Dudley Clarke’s tiny bathroom. But from small beginnings, camouflage and deception were soon achieving great things in the Middle East, and Clarke’s and Barkas’s people made a team.
‘If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars,’ wrote the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, and Clarke was swift to play upon the enemy’s fear of parachutists, which he read about in a captured Italian officer’s diary. In January 1941 Clarke started operation ABEAM, whose aim was to persuade the Italians that the British had parachutists in the Middle East ready to drop behind their lines. They had no such thing, but Wavell, one of the first British soldiers to appreciate airborne tactics, having watched 1,200 paratroops jump during the Soviet manoeuvres of 1936, encouraged Clarke’s new ploy.
Two years before any real British paratroopers appeared in the Middle East, Clarke coined the name of a wholly imaginary unit, the Special Air Service Brigade (SAS), and invented their story. The 1st battalion of the Special Air Service Brigade were parachutists, and the 2nd and 3rd battalions deployed in gliders. They were supposedly training south of Amman in Jordan at Bayir Wells camp (a real place Dudley Clarke knew from his time in the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force), guarded by Glubb’s (real) Arab Legion. Clarke’s ‘1 SAS’ comprised 500 (non-existent) paratroopers in ten platoons (A–K), armed with carbines and grenades. The Italians were led to believe that these men would drop with special containers packed with Bren guns, mortars, explosives, mines, and small-arms ammunition, just like German Fallschirmtruppen.
On 2 February 1941, Parade picture magazine in Cairo carried a photograph of a parachute-swaddled Abyssinian grinning in front of a large Bristol Bombay transport aircraft. (He was, in fact, just an Egyptian laundryman, dressed up.) Two days later, RAF HQ issued secret instructions to RAF units across the whole of the Middle East to report the stories that Clarke was spreading about the presence of British parachutists and gliders. More documents were planted and further sibs spread in Egypt and Palestine. In early April, Clarke carefully briefed two yeomanry gunners and set them loose in Alexandria, Cairo and Port Said wearing uniforms and badges of 1 SAS, which drew curious questions from other British servicemen. The gunners pretended to be toughly tight-lipped but dropped little hints that they were off to Crete, or raiding enemy lines of communication in Libya. Such information, trickling back through Axis intelligence, was unnerving for the enemy.
In April 1941, Clarke at last got his War Establishment (ME/1941/10/1) and his unit for the first time got its name, institutional recognition and its own offices. Clarke moved north from his bathroom at ‘Grey Pillars’ to a block of flats which now became the Advanced HQ of ‘A’ Force.
The name ‘A’ Force was deliberately vague. It could stand for anything, but Clarke pretended that it stood for ‘Airborne’, since he was currently fabricating non-existent British airborne forces in the Middle East. By the end of April, realistic dummy ‘gliders’ (the fictional ‘K detachment, SAS’) had appeared at Helwan air base near Cairo and were attracting attention locally. Fifty-seven sappers under Lieutenant Robertson, one of Clarke’s ten officers, skilfully engineered the fakes. In early May, Robertson’s sappers were converting these dummy gliders into the dummy bombers of the ‘Desert Air Force’ at Fuka near Mersa Matruh. In June, for the benefit of any spies and the captured Italians in the nearby PoW cages, Clarke arranged for the RAF to fly from Heliopolis and drop dummies by parachute over Helwan. They were then collected, repacked and driven back to base for another go. Some genuine parachutes were also diverted to Jock Lewes of B Battalion, No. 8 Commando, to practise with at Fuka.
What began as part of a deception scheme had major (and quite unexpected) consequences in the real world. Among Jock Lewes’s men at Fuka was one mad-keen commando who injured himself on a parachute jump. This was David Stirling, 6’ 5” tall, whose father was a general and whose mother was a Lovat of the Lovat Scouts tradition. Recovering in hospital, David Stirling re-thought the commando concept. He decided it had grown unwieldy, and instead devised a scheme to reduce the commandos to smaller, mobile four-man teams. Stirling was only a lieutenant and he had to sell this idea to the top brass at Middle East HQ; he later described the bureaucracy he had to get through as ‘layer upon layer of fossilised shit’, but he persevered. His idea eventually gave birth to Britain’s most famous raiding regiment, whose badge is a winged dagger above the motto ‘Who Dares Wins’. In 1985, Colonel David Stirling told the TV producer Gordon Stevens that
The name SAS came mainly from the fact that I was anxious to get ful
l cooperation of a very ingenious individual called Dudley Clark [e], who was responsible for running a deception outfit in Cairo … Clark [e] was quite an influential chap. He promised to give me all the help he could if I would use the name of his bogus brigade of parachutists, which is the Special Air Service, the SAS.
The Originals in their Own Words
Stirling said that when he ‘settled for L Detachment SAS … Dudley Clark [e] was delighted to have some flesh and blood parachutists instead of totally bogus ones’. This completed a unique hat-trick. Dudley Clarke helped to found and name three famous striking forces, the British Commandos, the US Rangers, and the SAS.
The principle behind what Dudley Clarke had done with the original, fictional, SAS was also very important in itself. Perhaps the essence of military intelligence is working out the opposition’s ‘order of battle’ and then analysing it. This is the military version of taxonomy, assembling all known information into a coherent and ordered picture. All the pieces – spies’ gossip, radio intercepts, newspaper stories, stolen or seized documents, front-line reports, aerial reconnaissance, the badges of captured personnel, phrases from PoW interrogations, vehicle identification marks, camp signposts, guidons, etc. – are part of the huge puzzle being put together so that ‘I’ or Intelligence can tell ‘Ops’ or Operations exactly which enemy units are where and what they are up to. Dudley Clarke knew how meticulous and orderly enemy staff were: he had that kind of mind himself and understood the satisfactions of things clicking into place. And so he fed the enemy’s hunger for precise information with perhaps his greatest creation, the ‘notional’ or bogus order of battle.
Inventing phantom forces was a long game that required a good memory, an efficient filing system, military realism and consistency over months and years. Between 1941 and 1945, Clarke invented seven more ‘notional’ brigades, thirty-two ‘notional’ divisions, ten corps and three entire armies. The Special Air Service Brigade was a small jewel in what became a large crown. But that initial imaginary force remained a particular success. First, Stirling turned Clarke’s dream into a famously effective reality, raiding behind enemy lines. Second, the discovery of the SAS’s actual existence in the field confirmed what German and Italian intelligence believed they already knew, and the small pleasure of that confirmation helped blind them to the fact that for much of the time they were being sold dummies.
It was in early 1942 that Clarke started drawing together all his fictitious units into a comprehensive deception plan called CASCADE. A loose-leaf ‘Book of Reference’ was drawn up which had all real and ‘notional’ units in it and was circulated to everyone who needed to know so there was no contradiction. Everything bogus had to have a history, a purpose, and physical evidence like identifiable signs which could appear on other (real) units’ vehicles for spies to spot. There had to be wireless traffic where necessary, and paperwork. Getting false information on to genuine documents was an administrative headache because once started it could never be neglected. But the grinding details paid off handsomely in the big picture. Clarke’s false or ‘notional’ order of battle, which made the enemy massively overestimate and miscalculate opposition and thus spread their own forces against all possible threats, is completely in the spirit of Sun Tzu’s Art of War:
For if [the enemy] prepares to the front his rear will be weak, and if to the rear his front will be fragile. If he prepares to the left, his right will be vulnerable and if to the right, there will be few on his left. And when he prepares everywhere, he will be weak everywhere.
By the end of WW2 Clarke and his imaginative disciples had conjured up phantom forces not just for the British but also for their Allies. One of the most important, the ‘First United States Army Group’ or FUSAG, played a decisive role around D-Day in 1944.
Back in February 1941, when he still had no staff or office and was ill with jaundice, Clarke already had a useful friend, colleague and daily visitor to his hospital bed in Brigadier Raymund Maunsell, the head of Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME), Cairo’s equivalent of MI5. This friendship became an enduring asset for ‘A’ Force. No one had a wider range of contacts than SIME for spreading sibs and planting information useful for strategic deception. Police and security people have their own mafia of professional association and Maunsell, always called by his initials, ‘RJ’, was in touch with Egyptian, Indian, Persian and Turkish officials, as well as British colonial counter-espionage in Aden, Sudan and Palestine. He watched the Spanish, Rumanian, Bulgarian and Japanese consulates closely, employed both Sephardi Jewish and Muslim Brotherhood agents in Cairo, and bribed Egyptian policemen and concierges for useful information. Through the Field Security branch of the Military Police (later part of the Intelligence Corps), Maunsell also had access to captured Axis spies who could spread disinformation.
One of the first of these ‘double agents’ was a Bedouin called Ahmed Sayef, arrested on the Libyan–Egyptian frontier by Lieutenant A. W. Sansom, a fleshy little man, born in Cairo to a British father himself born in Baghdad, who was familiar with the Egyptian demimonde and fluent in Arabic, French, Greek and Italian. The man he had captured, Sayef, was working for Sheikh Mustapha ben Haroun, who managed the Arabic-speaking spies for Italian intelligence.
Sansom informed Maunsell of Sayef’s existence, and duly let the Bedouin know that he would get double pay if he took back certain information to the Italians. But quite soon Sayef started coming back over the frontier from Italian-held Libya with what was found to be false information. Clearly, the Italians had discovered he was a double agent and were playing the British at their own game. But Maunsell of Intelligence told Sansom of Field Security not to say anything to Sayef because even false information was valuable, once it was known to be false. Finding what the enemy wants you to think may be as useful as truffling up something he does not want you to know. Sansom thought that the British were winning as long as (a) the enemy did not know our information was false, or (b) did not know we knew that theirs was.
Sansom was appointed chief Field Security officer for the Cairo area and recruited informers from all sorts of communities: Palestinian Jews, Greek Cypriots, Lebanese Christians, Sudanese and so on. He also kept an eye on Axis civilians and Arab nationalists and looked out for spies and security leaks among the usual big city lowlife of crooks, deserters, extortionists, fences, gunrunners and hashish-dealers. Sansom’s man at the central telephone exchange tipped him off about any interesting phone calls. ‘Mac’ (or Mahmoud), the barman at the Kit Kat cabaret, was on the payroll, whereas Joe the Swiss in the Long Bar at Shepheard’s was believed (but never quite proved) to work for the enemy.
Madames of brothels told Sansom bedroom secrets; the infidelities of the officer class entered his security fiefdom, but Sansom was never a man to confuse morals with morale. He understood that plenty of available and reasonable prostitutes kept the warriors happy, whatever puritan authorities thought. ‘Cairo at this time was one big knocking shop,’ he wrote in his entertaining memoir I Spied Spies. Many houses and blocks of flats had been converted into furnished accommodation that could be rented by the month, week, day, night or even hour. Privacy was guaranteed and Sansom himself maintained three such flats around the city for meeting informants and changing disguises. Dudley Clarke later used two on the floor below a brothel at 6, Kasr-el-Nil, for his new offices in April 1941. They were a perfect cover: no one paid much attention to the comings and goings of different officers.
On 10 March 1941, the first twelve camouflage captains, trained by Colonel Buckley in England, arrived in Cairo after a two-month voyage round the Cape of Good Hope. They included John Codner, Edwin Galligan, Robert Medley, Peter Proud, Steven Sykes and Jasper Maskelyne. They were all flat broke. Typically, the one who made the telephone call to Barkas asking for money was Maskelyne, the charming but feckless stage magician. Maskelyne’s theatrical charisma has cadged him more credit than perhaps he deserves among the camoufleurs. Julian Trevelyan, who knew Maskelyne, wr
ote more matter-of-factly that he was ‘at once innocent and urbane, and … ended up as an Entertainments officer in the Middle East’.
And yet illusionists and stage magicians do catch people’s imaginations. This is one reason why Dudley Clarke employed Maskelyne in ‘A’ Force. His entertainments were lectures on escape and evasion given to over 200,000 aircrew across the Middle East, and he also helped MI9 in inventing parachute packaging and small devices and tools that prisoners could hide. Maskelyne’s presence embodied the power of deception for older heads among the military who remembered his grandfather Maskelyne’s Hall of Magic in Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. Even the dimmest staff officer understood that conjurors made things appear and disappear, so the spell of Maskelyne sprinkled a bit of stardust over the dull business of camouflage, and strengthened Clarke’s hand at GHQ.
After Wavell, at Churchill’s instructions, had pulled back and disbanded General O’Connor’s Western Desert Force in order to send 50,000 troops and 8,000 vehicles to Greece and Crete, Rommel launched a blitzkrieg attack on the skeleton force left behind in Cyrenaica Command, Eastern Libya. Wavell did not expect this. He missed the warning signs from ULTRA because he did not think Rommel was ready. Wavell simply had too much on his plate: there was fighting in the Balkans to the north and East Africa to the south, and when Rommel attacked from the west, there was also trouble to Wavell’s east.
Churchill's Wizards Page 40
