Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  Exactly coinciding with Rommel’s advance, a coup d’état in Iraq by the Arab nationalist Rashid Ali el-Gailani and a group of colonels threatened the militarily vital oil pipeline to British Palestine. The trouble in Iraq was partly an extension of the Arab rebellion that Clarke had helped to suppress in Palestine in 1936, after which the Grand Mufti and the top guerrilla leader had moved on to Baghdad to foment trouble. El-Gailani’s coup succeeded in toppling the pro-British monarchy, but the importance of Iraqi oil to the British meant that it could not be allowed to last long. For Wavell, it was just one more headache at a time when the Germans under Rommel were enjoying great successes.

  Through April 1941, the German Panzers swept the British back to the Egyptian frontier, wiping out all the gains of COMPASS and capturing British Generals Gambier-Parry, Neame and O’Connor into the bargain. Only the port of Tobruk in all Libya held out against regular German assault by land and continuous dive-bombing from nearby El Adem airfield. Peter Proud, one of the camoufleurs who came out with Maskelyne, found himself trapped inside besieged Tobruk with a lot of Australian infantry and British gunners. Like Geoffrey Barkas, Proud had worked in films, and now put his skills as an art director to good use, improvising camouflage and screening on poles to help defend Tobruk, using scrounged fabric. Real artillery was hidden; meanwhile dummy weapons, lorries and tanks made of scrap formed decoy targets to draw enemy fire. Irregular patches sewn on draped nets effectively imitated broken ground. Nothing was quite what it seemed in the dusty white broken town. Around the thirty-five-mile perimeter mines lay buried, unsleeping camouflaged sentries. Troops with their footfalls muffled by crepe-rubber soles patrolled aggressively right into the German lines. There was much driving of vehicles to make dust for disguise and diversion. The garrison destroyed or altered landmarks to deflect German artillery range-finding, and mixed real Observation Posts with dummy OPs up poles. When some army vehicles had to be repainted to appear different and thus more numerous, Proud created a starchy coating from condemned foodstuffs mixed with seawater. Life during the 246-day siege was half-troglodytic, half-holiday. Men slept in caves underneath rubble, breathing air through transplanted ship’s ventilators, but by day they leapt up from swimming and sunbathing in shorts and boots to man Bofors, Bren, or Lewis guns during frequent air raids. A daily newspaper, The Tobruk Truth, was compiled, cyclostyled and circulated.

  The harbour was the back door for supply and relief. The entire garrison of Tobruk was changed in the eight-month siege. 27,000 men were shipped out and 29,000 shipped in, including Indians, Poles and South Africans. Much of the movement happened at night, and Peter Proud helped hide the navy lighters and gunboats by day, concealing them among the wrecked shipping in the harbour or in especially netted-over coves. The last three Hurricane fighters were skilfully hidden underground while decoy hangars and model aircraft drew away German bombing and strafing. Camouflage also protected the vital water-distilling plant. The distillery was far too prominent to conceal but it could be made to look wrecked. After a stick of Axis bombs struck nearby, a British camouflage party rushed out to dig bigger bomb holes and to scatter debris prepared beforehand, a cement and paint team created a black, ragged ‘hole’ in the roof and side of the building, and the demolition team blew up an unused cooling tower. It made a pretty picture for the high-altitude Italian reconnaissance plane, and Rome claimed a direct hit on Tobruk’s distillery – which in fact continued to produce its peculiar but potable water.

  The next British push-back was operation crusader, in which Clarke’s ‘A’ force also played a role. The camoufleur Steven Sykes was sent into the Western desert in 1941 to make nine miles of dummy railhead which ran west of Misheifa to a fake ‘Depot no 2’, complete with ramps and sidings. The idea was to draw enemy bombing away from the real railway that CRUSADER would use, which ran to Depot no. 1, and also to convince the enemy that the British still had not completed their preparations to attack.

  They started laying real rails but used only a few sleepers. Eventually they ran out of rails and used tracks made of flattened petrol tins, bashed into shape and blackened. The eighteen flat cars and thirty-three box wagons were constructed from local hurdles of split palm-branch known as gerida, covered with canvas. Sykes was rather proud of his locomotive which made real smoke from an old army cookhouse Soyer stove inside. When materials ran short they had to scale everything down to two-thirds size. Sykes also used objects known as ‘net gun pits’ that Peter Proud had invented, which could be carried six to a truck. They were made of canvas and covered with camouflage netting, and when raised on poles, each net gun pit looked just like an artillery gun dug into a pit. ‘Depot no. 2’ was bombed by the enemy, the ultimate badge of honour to a camoufleur. (Barkas claimed that 100 bombs fell on the dummies but Sykes modestly said this was ‘perhaps more than I would have claimed myself’.) Sykes spent a lot of time driving through the desert too, picking up abandoned ‘Sunshields’, canvas and wood folding covers that clipped over a tank and made it look like an innocuous 3-ton lorry. The Sunshield could easily be cast aside when going into action. These special hoods were designed to Wavell’s specification, and built by Victor Jones of ‘A’ Force.

  Clarke’s men were by now doing effective work on many fronts. In the summer of 1941, dummy tanks deployed by Captain Ogilvie-Grant of ‘A’ Force were a crucial part of the defence of Cyprus. The island was never invaded by the Germans or Italians because it was believed to be strongly reinforced. Before the real 50th Division arrived, the entirely notional 7th Division appeared to have three infantry brigades plus divisional troops, four squadrons of tanks, a ‘Special Services’ battalion and lots of anti-aircraft guns. There were, in fact, just a few real men who kept busy creating and re-creating a mirage.

  Meanwhile, Clarke himself had set off for neutral Turkey on 26 April 1941, carrying a personal letter from Wavell to Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the ill-fated British Ambassador to Turkey. (Only a few months later, Knatchbull-Hugesson’s Albanian butler, code-named CICERO by the Germans, started regularly photographing the confidential documents in the diplomat’s safe.) Churchill was anxious to get Turkey on the Allied side and sent his Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to offer ‘stimulus and guidance’, but the Turks resolutely refused to enter the war until February 1945, when they were sure Nazi Germany was on its last legs.

  Clarke’s real mission was in Istanbul. He discreetly met up with the British assistant naval attaché, Commander Vladimir Wolfson, RNVR, one of the excellent people picked by Admiral John Godfrey, the director of Naval Intelligence. Working together over the next three weeks, Wolfson and Clarke began what Clarke called a ‘long and profitable partnership’ that lasted until the end of the war. They began by planting stories about the British SAS and the Free French attacking Rommel from behind, and set up ten new channels for getting deceptive material to German agents, to be triggered by code messages from Clarke to Wolfson sent via the British embassy. These channels included Greeks, Hungarians, Iraqis, Russians, Swedes and Turks who worked in banking, carpetselling, diplomacy, journalism and stenography. The two men also organised a skeleton MI9 system for the area to help Allied servicemen escape from Greece, Bulgaria and Rumania and travel via Turkey back to the Middle East.

  Clarke travelled by express train through the night of 17 May south-east from Ankara towards Adana and the Syrian frontier with Turkey. It was a delicate moment of history. Two days earlier, German aeroplanes had begun landing in Syria on their way to support Rashid Ali’s anti-British rebellion in Iraq. Wavell had confided to Clarke before he left that he would attack Vichy Syria in just that contingency, and the RAF had promptly bombed Syrian aerodromes at Aleppo, Damascus, Rayak and Palmyra. Oil pipelines that supplied northern Iraq’s 2.5 million tons of oil every year from Mosul and Kirkuk ran to Haditha on the Euphrates and then split in two. The northern section led to the port of Tripoli in Lebanon, then part of Vichy Syria, and the southern ran through Transjordan to the port of
Haifa in British Palestine. The British had initially closed down the flow to Syria, but in April 1941 Iraqi troops supporting Rashid Ali seized the Anglo-Iraqi Petroleum Company oil fields, re-opened the flow to Vichy Syria and shut down the pipeline to British Palestine. The new commander-in-chief of India, General Claude Auchinleck, diverted to Basra a brigade of Indian troops, Sikhs and Gurkhas, who had been destined for Malaya, and Wavell sent an expeditionary force of 6,000 men across the desert from Palestine in May. The short, sharp Allied campaign was all over by early June. The coup was crushed, and Rashid Ali, the Mufti and the Arab Nationalist guerrillas were sent packing over the border into Iran.

  Against this background Clarke evaded the British consular officials at Adana on the Turkish border who were trying to prevent British citizens from entering Vichy Syria. He reached Tripoli on 18 May then drove to Beirut to get the latest information on the military situation for Wavell; the day after that he was in a car with a Jewish refugee family travelling south down the coast road from Beirut to Palestine. Between Sidon and Tyre, Clarke managed to stop the car by what he called ‘a lucky stratagem’ at ‘the key point of the Litani river crossing’. He covertly surveyed the area that the British 7th Division would have to take when invading Lebanon from Palestine. The road followed the flat ground at the edge of the foothills about 1,000 yards from the sea, and crossed the river over the stone arches of the vital Quâsmiyeh bridge. The Litani river was about 40 yards wide and flowed between steep banks lined with poplars. North of the river was a 500-foot hill from which a Vichy redoubt bristling with guns overlooked the bridge amid orchards and cornfields. Clarke saw the fort would have to be dealt with before any invasion could be successful.

  Three weeks later, nearly 400 men of No. 11 (Scottish) Commando landed from the sea to attack the redoubt and seize the bridge. The Vichy French, however, promptly blew up the bridge and, because many of the commandos were put ashore by the Royal Navy on the wrong side of the river, they suffered fifty wounded and fifty-four killed, including their colonel, before they secured the crossing.

  By 21 May Clarke was back in Cairo, briefing Wavell on all he had done and seen, and preparing a high-level deception to assist the invasion of Vichy Syria, scheduled for 7 June. Clarke intended to spread the story that this attack had been called off because of a flaming row between the Allies. (‘There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies,’ Churchill had remarked in 1940, ‘and that is fighting without them.’) The story was that GHQ Middle East had quarrelled with Free French HQ, who had failed to persuade Wavell of the need to invade Vichy Syria. Harsh words had apparently been spoken. General de Gaulle was said to have flown up to Cairo to mediate, been rebuffed, and promptly packed his bags and left. On 4 June, Dudley Clarke got an Arab agent across the frontier into Syria with the news that General de Gaulle had flown off to Khartoum in a dudgeon. It is not clear if the story worked, but the campaign was a success. By Bastille Day 1941, Vichy Syria had fallen to the Allies.

  By then, Wavell himself had been sacked by Churchill. After fighting valiantly on five fronts, Wavell was replaced on 21 June, the day that Germany invaded Russia. The Prime Minister who had goaded and harassed him from afar now swapped Wavell with Auchinleck from India. Auchinleck, known as ‘the Auk’, kept the same team going at GHQ Cairo, and Dudley Clarke still ran ‘A’ Force.

  ‘The real home of successful deception was the Middle East,’ conceded J. C. Masterman in his book, The Double-cross System of WW2. However, The Official History of the Security Service 1908–1945, completed by John Curry in 1946, points out that Security Intelligence Middle East was pretty much on its own, cut off from MI5. As Curry puts it: ‘While the Security organisations in the Middle East had expanded enormously they had to a great extent lost touch with developments in London and during 1940 and 1941 … received little benefit from London’s experience and knowledge of the Abwehr and its ramifications.’ Raymond Maunsell of SIME used a ‘turned’ German agent called Durrent in spring 1940, very soon after MI5 in London began the practice, but the effective use of double agents thereafter seems to have evolved independently in the Middle East. The first proper ‘play back’ or double agent that Dudley Clarke used in Cairo was Renato Levi, a handsome Italian Jew in his mid-thirties. He had been a reliable source of information for the SIS in France before being recruited by Mussolini’s military intelligence service, Servizio di Informazione Militare (SIM). Levi stayed in touch with British SIS while persuading the Italians that he could set up an espionage network for them in Cairo, where he arrived early in 1941. His first British contact in Cairo was Kenyon Jones, a burly ex-Rugby Blue from SIME hired by Maunsell because he spoke German.

  Levi had picked up reasonable English in Australia. He was an easygoing man who lived on his wits and had an eye for the girls and the good life. Levi cheerily assured Kenyon Jones that he was going to be sent a wireless transmitter set via the diplomatic bag of a neutral embassy in the Balkans. Meanwhile he asked for a place to stay and an innocuous job. While they waited for the radio, which never came, Renato chased women. Kenyon Jones suggested using a civilian wireless transmitter (W/T) set instead.

  An amateur radio enthusiast built them the right kind of set in a fortnight. Jones used a simple but effective code based on an alphabetic grid-square with a changing keyword on the top line, and Levi took it back to Italian Military Intelligence in Rome, telling them that he had recruited an (imaginary) agent called Paul Nicossof who would be sending messages in Morse from Cairo. After muddles over frequencies, the first successful transmission from ‘Nicossof’ was made one afternoon in July 1941 from a British radio station at Abbassia near Cairo. Jones had encoded a short message from ‘Nicossof’ claiming to have made some useful contacts. The signaller tapped out the jumbled letters in Morse code, was rewarded with grazie in clear, and then a coded message sent back from Rome.

  Jones said later it was ‘undoubtedly the biggest thrill I had in the war’. When he told Maunsell about it the next morning, his boss said, ‘We must get hold of Dudley at once and you had also better bring in SIS.’ In his autobiography, The Road Uphill, Jones described Clarke as ‘small in stature, humorous, highly intelligent and quick on the uptake’, and said he came to like and admire him. What most impressed Jones was Clarke’s amazing talent for getting things done. He had access at any time to the Chief of Staff, Arthur Smith, and to Wavell, the Commander-in-Chief, and ‘the whole apparatus of GHQ seemed to be at his disposal!’

  Clarke provided Kenyon Jones with the messages that the channel – now code-named CHEESE – would send to the Italians. As he became more trusted as a source, his messages went straight to the Abwehr and to Rommel’s HQ. Creating the rich CHEESE board of ‘notional’ contacts in Cairo and across the Middle East was a task handed on to Evan John, an eccentric older writer and artist who had been in the Commandos, then joined the Intelligence Corps, and was posted to SIME in 1941 because, he drily said, he happened to mention ‘in some portly presence’ that he once talked with T. E. Lawrence in Oxford.

  In his autobiographical memoir Time in the East, Evan John described Clarke (whom he only called ‘The Colonel’) as ‘a professional soldier with a great love of good English … He had read widely in literature, especially spiteful literature. His combined love for malice and good style naturally led him to the eighteenth century, and he knew his Junius better than – as a thorough-going atheist – he knew his Bible.’ John’s view of Clarke’s character is interesting. You need a sharp edge to be good at deception. Clarke’s awareness of human folly helped him to take advantage of it; a degree of malice may have spurred him on in his attempts to mislead and deceive, but he also knew his stratagems had a useful purpose. When a trick worked, he must have felt delight at many levels, intellectual, creative and patriotic, something more complex than mere spite.

  22

  Impersonations

  When Clarke arrived in Lisbon on 22 August 1941 to set up ways of distributing deceptive material
from the Middle East, he was once again impersonating a bogus journalist, this time in colourful summer shirts. The place was an entrepôt of spooks, heaving with agents and double-dealers from both sides and a natural hub for gossip because flights between England and the Middle East used it as an overnight stopping place, and there were also connections to the USA. Ten days before Clarke arrived, the double agent Dusko Popov had left on a Pan Am flying boat for New York City, carrying in a microdot an Abwehr questionnaire with two dozen questions about the defences of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It might have been read as a warning to the Americans that the Axis were considering a strike, but even though the Federal Bureau of Investigation passed on Popov’s information to the army and navy, America was still unprepared when, four months later, on 7 December 1941, hundreds of Japanese war planes attacked US ships and aircraft in Pearl Harbor.

  Clarke managed to find sixteen new channels for his misinformation. Some were Germans or Portuguese who could pass documents or information directly, others were Axis-sympathisers or just gossips picked from a floating foreign population that included Americans, French, Spanish and Swiss, ‘of both sexes and mostly of doubtful occupation’. These people were transient, though, and Clarke missed Vladimir Wolfson who had supported him when they were doing the same job in Istanbul a few months earlier, and who could have kept the supply of contacts going.

  As Clarke moved around Lisbon and Estoril for almost a month that summer he must at some point have crossed paths with a young man who was in the same city and absolutely desperate to get into the great game. Perhaps they sat in the same cinema, looking up at the same black and white newsreels, but reading them differently. Had they met, it would have been a most interesting encounter.

  Juan Pujol García, a 29-year-old from Barcelona, was the opposite of a professional soldier. His Catalan father was a kindly, ethical, apolitical man who had brought his son up to loathe oppression and war and to believe the pen was mightier than the sword. Pujol was proud that he never fired a shot in the Spanish Civil War: he hid from recruitment, he deserted, he was imprisoned, he improvised, he survived. But when WW2 came, he determined to do the right thing for humanity through practical action that did not involve fighting. He was not a mercenary (unlike Dusko Popov, always a natural businessman doing deals on the side) but an idealist, a bookish and bespectacled person who had passed through occupations from chicken farming to hotel management on his way towards an as yet unknown destiny. He worked hard and could apply himself, but he was better at making things up than making money, and he could talk the hind legs off a donkey.