Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  His father’s library had fed Pujol’s liberal sympathies. In common with other Spaniards, despite censorship, constant Axis propaganda and the Madrid press baying approval of Hitler’s march across Europe, he sometimes managed to hear appalling stories of what the Nazis were doing to people in the extermination camps of Germany and Poland. Like everyone else in the Spanish-speaking world, he was caught up in WW2, willy-nilly.

  In January 1941 Pujol approached the British embassy in Madrid and offered to work for them as a secret agent in Germany or Italy, but was turned away. He then went to the German embassy and, boasting of his right-wing credentials, offered to work for them as a secret agent in Lisbon or Great Britain. He was turned away again. But he persisted, and the Germans said they might be interested if he could get himself to Britain. Pujol went to Lisbon to try to get accreditation as a journalist, but in the end managed to get a forged Spanish diplomatic pass by fooling a Portuguese printer that he worked for the Spanish embassy. Back in Madrid he flashed the document and conned two German intelligence officers that he was working with the Spanish security police and would soon be off to England to track down some missing money. Pujol’s fast talking and authentic-seeming papers persuaded the Abwehr men that he was genuine, so they gave him US$3000 and a crash course in writing in invisible ink. A genuine German intelligence officer, Fritz Knappe-Ratey, told him to get in touch with the correspondent of the right-wing newspaper ABC in London, Luís Calvo, an established German agent there, and said he could use the Spanish diplomatic bag for messages. Pujol bridled, saying that he hoped the Abwehr would not be so indiscreet with his name as they had been with Calvo’s, and insisted he preferred to work alone.

  Pujol wrapped the roll of dollar notes in a condom, hid it in a tube of toothpaste, and crossed the frontier to Portugal in July 1941. There he went to the British embassy and showed them the secret ink and the list of questions the Abwehr wanted him to find answers to. No interest. He tried again. Someone said they would rendezvous with him, but never turned up. Pujol had already sent a letter to Madrid (who had the largest Abwehr Kriegsorganisation outside Germany) falsely announcing his arrival in England. Now he had the mind-boggling task of proving to the Germans that he was a secret agent spying for them in a country he had never visited, in a language he barely spoke. Not yet ‘Our Man in London’, just a man on his own in Lisbon, he had to make everything up from scratch.

  And so, like any fiction writer doing research, by August Pujol was haunting Lisbon libraries and bookshops, ransacking reference books like the deep red 1937 Baedeker Great Britain: Handbook for Travellers, which had maps and street plans, and Bradshaw’s Guide to the British Railways. He pored over British journals and newspapers, copied down the names of likely firms from advertisements, and stared at any cinema newsreels which had footage from Britain. He bought a big map of Great Britain, a Blue Guide to England, an Anglo-French lexicon of military terms, a Portuguese guide to the British Fleet, and sat down in his rented rooms, in Cascais, and then in Estoril, to compose detailed fantasies for his German masters in Madrid.

  Is it so incredible that professionally trained Abwehr intelligence officers treated these amateur inventions as true? There is an almost infinite human capacity for self-deception. We like to hear what agrees with us, and what is most agreeable is a confirmation of the prejudices we already hold. We see what we think we are seeing – a mirage in Iraq, a chimera in Afghanistan, a vital secret agent in London.

  In September 1941 Clarke, responding to a summons from the Imperial General Staff, the very top of the British defence machinery, came back from Lisbon to a bleaker London. Four months earlier, his elegant little flat in Stratton Street had been destroyed by a parachute mine in the last great Luftwaffe raid of the Blitz. Back in North Africa, what Clarke had once known as ‘Western Desert Force’ or ‘the Army of the Nile’ was being redesignated the Eighth Army, and they were getting ready for operation CRUSADER, Auchinleck’s attack on Rommel in Cyrenaica. The Prime Minister hungered to smash Rommel’s Afrika Korps, and at this critical moment Clarke was asked to write and circulate a paper on his experience of strategic deception in Middle East Command.

  On 29 September, Clarke was introduced to Guy Liddell, MI5’s director of counter-espionage, who recorded in his diary that Clarke ‘has many double-cross schemes and controls both rumours and purveying false information through Maunsell’s channels. Evidently his operations have been very successful’. Clarke told Liddell about the lessons he had learned from the failure of his stratagems in Ethiopia, but also described the effective ‘notional’ reinforcement of Cyprus, where ‘A’ Force’s cod wireless traffic and dummy tanks had helped to keep the island safe from attack. Liddell saw that things got done quicker in the Middle East because Wavell had ensured deception was part of operations instead of getting stuck further down the food chain in planning or intelligence.

  On 1 October, Clarke attended the weekly Wednesday MI5 XX (Double Cross) Committee meeting. The next day he met the people supporting the chiefs of staff at the War Cabinet Office, who had been shown his new paper. Both the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee (chaired by Bill Cavendish-Bentinck, and including the three directors of naval, military and air intelligence) and the Joint Planning Staff (whose directors ran strategic, executive and future operational planning sections) were impressed by what he had written. Clarke talked with Guy Liddell again and arranged to inform MI5 of all his deception plans and to tell them exactly what support he needed. From now on, London and the Middle East were to share full knowledge, using ‘some sort of code within a cipher in order to ensure secrecy’ that they had discussed before. (For example, whenever Clarke said ‘counter’ he would mean ‘encourage’.) On the subject of deception, Liddell rather priggishly warned that MI5 ‘could not embark upon a policy of downright lying. We could, however, put forward tentative half-truths.’

  On Tuesday, 7 October, Clarke met the joint chiefs of staff themselves. The chairman, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was his old boss at the War Office, John Dill, now a happy widower due to get married again the next day. Clarke already knew Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal from Aden, and Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, the chief of Combined Operations, from his commando days. The next day, the Joint Planning Staff, who had also read Clarke’s paper, recommended to the chiefs of staff that a section like ‘A’ Force should be set up in the heart of the War Cabinet Office, its mission to control deception worldwide. It was a stunning vindication of Clarke’s and Wavell’s ideas. The section was to be intrinsic to operations, directly commanded by someone with the staff to plan and execute schemes, and able to draw on the resources of all other branches. The chiefs of staff accepted the plan, and Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, asked Clarke if he would like to become the new section’s first controlling officer.

  This was the plum job and Clarke could not have been better qualified to do it. But it was also a sweetly poisoned chalice. Clarke was experienced enough to know it was better to be the big fish in a smaller pond that he understood intimately. Further from the centre in the Middle East, he had more direct power and greater operational freedom. Perhaps he enjoyed greater personal freedom too. As would soon emerge, he was sometimes a risk-taker. Out there, he was treated indulgently when he was driven by Corporal Payne from the front of Shepheard’s Hotel to GHQ to arrive exactly half an hour late for the commander-in-chief’s morning meeting. Here in London, everything he did would be known, and he could be easily ignored, outclassed, outranked and outmanoeuvred. He declined the job on the grounds of loyalty, saying that he was a staff officer serving General Auchinleck and they were currently mid-operation. He added that it was not quite fair to pinch a man’s butler when he had been lent you for the night, which made Pound laugh.

  Instead the chiefs offered the job to Colonel Oliver Stanley, director of the Future Operations Planning Section. He was not really right for the role, but among the three General Staff officers that Stanley employed to help
him was Dennis Wheatley, whom we last met in 1940 writing a paper for the defence of Britain against Nazi invasion. He had taken up fiction after he lost his wine business in the 1930 slump and came to widespread public attention in 1934 with The Devil Rides Out, a novel which blended a John Buchanesque ‘shocker’ of contemporary politics with black magic and gossip. Wheatley now had to do a three-week square-bashing course at Uxbridge in December 1941 to qualify him as a pilot officer in the RAF. Then he lined his blue greatcoat with red silk and had a swagger stick made that concealed a 15-inch blade. His excellent book The Deception Planners, his seventy-fifth, published posthumously in 1980, describes how the new deception system started out ‘near impotence’. It was so secret that they were ‘kept absolutely incommunicado and not even allowed to tell other members of the Joint Planning Staff what we were up to, though actually for several weeks we were not up to anything at all’.

  The new deception system, although approved at such a high level, did not really start becoming effective until Wavell once again took a hand from the Far East, sending a telegram to Churchill on 21 May 1942, saying that if deception was not to remain ‘local and ephemeral’, it had to be planned and operated from the very centre of strategy. The current approach was too defensive; Wavell suggested ‘a policy of bold imaginative deception’ to be worked between London, Washington DC and all the commanders in the field. On that very same day, the chiefs of staff approved Lieutenant Colonel John Bevan as Stanley’s replacement.

  Why did Wavell show a renewed interest in deception in May 1942? After the Japanese attacked the Americans at Pearl Harbor and launched their onslaught on the British and Dutch Empires in the Far East, Wavell the commander-in-chief of Allied Forces decided that he needed another Dudley Clarke to help him. Early in January 1942 he sent for Peter Fleming who travelled out to India via Cairo where he went through all the ‘A’ Force files and talked to Clarke. By late March, Fleming was staying with Wavell in New Delhi, and setting up General Staff Intelligence (Deception) (GSI (d)). ‘It is a one-horse show,’ Fleming wrote to Dennis Wheatley, ‘and I am the horse.’ The first outing for this steed began over dinner in Delhi one evening in late April 1942, when Wavell told Fleming and Bernard Fergusson about Allenby’s deceptions in Palestine in WW1 and in particular about Richard Meinertzhagen’s haversack ruse.

  Fleming and Wavell stayed up till one a.m. planning a ruse of their own in Burma, which was later code-named ERROR. The Burmese military situation at that moment was critical: the ferociously determined Japanese Imperial Army was advancing from the south and Generals Harold Alexander and Bill Slim were trying to manage the successful retreat of British, Chinese and Indian forces northwards from Rangoon to Mandalay and then north-east towards the Indian frontier. Operation error intended to convince Japanese Intelligence that the British commander-in-chief, Wavell himself, had had a car accident during a hurried last minute visit to the front, leaving behind a briefcase of his important secret papers.

  Peter Fleming assembled the contents of the briefcase with care. He persuaded Wavell to part with some genuine personal letters as well as a favourite photograph of his daughter Pamela. Among the papers were Wavell’s ‘Notes to Alexander’, which alluded to ‘two armies’ in Burma, growing air strength and a new secret weapon. Altogether the documents made the Allies seem far stronger in India than the Japanese had estimated. Fleming also forged an apparently indiscreet letter by Joan Bright Astley, who was running General Ismay’s ‘Secret Intelligence Centre’ for commanders-in-chief in Winston Churchill’s Defence Office in London, and he borrowed one of Wavell’s impressivelyribboned coats.

  Fleming flew to Burma early on 29 April 1942, accompanied by Wavell’s ADC, Captain Sandy Reid-Scott. As a Second Lieutenant in the 11th Hussars, Reid-Scott had won the MC in December 1940 and then lost an eye in an air attack on the Bardia to Tobruk road. At Shwebo, on the plain in central Burma between the Chindwin and the Irrawaddy rivers, Fleming and Reid-Scott conferred with General Harold Alexander. His chief of staff suggested that a good place for the ruse was about sixty miles south: the Ava bridge across the Irrawaddy river at Sagaing, just downstream from Mandalay, where the last of the Burma Corps would be retreating north. With his usual unerring luck, Fleming now ran into Mike Calvert who had helped him with Auxiliary Units in Kent in 1940, and was here commanding a battalion. They obtained an almost brand-new, green, Ford Mercury V8 staff car and drove it south to the Ava bridge and 17th Divisional HQ at Sagaing. Panicking Indian refugees and retreating Chinese soldiers were coming the other way, and seemed ‘a ragged and sorry sight’ to Reid-Scott.

  Major General Bill Slim, the Burma Corps Commander (and future Field Marshal) was marshalling the retreat, trying to see that the Chinese Fifth Army and 7th Armoured Brigade got north across the Irrawaddy before the iron road-and-rail bridge was blown up by midnight. Around 7.30pm, on a curve 400 yards south of the bridgehead, Fleming and Calvert made some skidmarks and then ran their empty sedan staff car off the road. ‘The results were not spectacular’, Fleming wrote. ‘The car flounced down the embankment without overturning, crossed a cart track, and plunged into a small nullah, at the bottom of which it came to rest with its engine still ticking over self-righteously.’ They let the air out of one tyre, punctured the other, banged the bodywork about a bit, threw stones to break the windscreen and headlights and took the ignition keys. In the boot of the car they left the briefcase together with Wavell’s service dress jacket with its ribbons and commander-in-chief’s medal on the breast, two blankets and three novels nicked from the Shwebo Club library. The vehicle was in good condition, visible from the road, and likely to attract enemy attention. By eight o’clock the conspirators were back north of the bridge in the jeep.

  Slim saw the last Stuart tanks in the retreat – each one weighing 13 tons – singly and gingerly crossing the Irrawaddy on a roadway that was meant to have a capacity of only 6 tons, and applauded the British engineering of the Ava bridge in its last hours. ‘With a resounding thump it was blown at 2359 hours on 30th April, and its centre spans fell neatly into the river–asad sight, and a signal that we had lost Burma,’ wrote Slim at the end of the chapter ‘Disaster’ in Defeat into Victory.

  As with many deceptions, it is not known exactly what ERROR achieved. The Japanese never invaded India. But Peter Fleming came to think that the Intelligence branch of the Japanese Imperial Army was not worthy of the name. Stolidly dim, they could not be relied upon to make the right deductions from obvious facts, and they were either ignored or despised by people in Japanese Operations. Fleming surmised that the briefcase plant was probably far too subtle a diversion. ‘What we want’, he cabled London Controlling Section, ‘is not red herrings, but purple whales.’ purple whales in time became the code-name of a double agent among Chiang Kai-Shek’s Chinese in Chungking, used to pass (or even better, sell) false high-level documents, all imaginatively concocted by Peter Fleming, to the Japanese.

  When ‘Johnny’ Bevan took charge in June 1942, he wrote his own energising directive for ‘London Controlling Section’ (LCS). Reporting directly to the chiefs of staff, the LCS was to prepare and coordinate strategic deception and cover plans, support their execution, and do all and anything ‘calculated to mystify or mislead the enemy whenever military advantage may be so gained’.

  Bevan was an Old Etonian stockbroker with good social connections who had impressed Churchill in the First World War. Both Bevan and Wheatley were gregarious and clubbable, which was important when they needed to make important friends and pull strings. Bon viveur Wheatley kept his cellar well stocked through his old mates in the wine trade, and was a great believer in lunch, as well as a good dinner. Getting tight was part of the job; sociability lubricated vital contacts. A typical wartime lunch at Rules started with two or three Pimms at the bar followed by a snorter of absinthe (known as ‘Chanel No. 5’), red or white wine with the smoked salmon or potted shrimps, Dover sole, jugged hare, salmon or game, and then port or Kümm
el with a Welsh rarebit. Little wonder Wheatley took secret afternoon naps in bedrooms reserved for cabinet ministers. Bevan was much fussier, more nervous, and driven, so the two men complemented each other well.

  Others who came to join LCS included Major Ronald Wingate, son of Sir Reginald Wingate, Sirdar of the Sudan in T. E. Lawrence’s day. Wingate was a former civil servant who relished the Byzantine hierarchies of British bureaucracy. Because he understood perfectly what he called ‘the working of the protocol’ he achieved results that no outsider could ever hope to match. Whereas Bevan could get irritable and rude, Wingate was always imperturbable and urbane. Wheatley considered him ‘as cunning as seven serpents’.

  It was Bevan who moved the LCS down into the fortified underground basement of the No. 10 Downing Street Annexe. Upstairs they had been physically isolated, but now they were right in the thick of things. Wheatley compared the Cabinet War Rooms to the lower deck of a battleship. Steel support girders held up five-foot-thick concrete bombproofing, and pipes and cables ran overhead through the whitewashed narrow passages of a warren of over a hundred rooms, with chemical lavatories and stale air, guarded by armed Royal Marines. This was where strategic decisions were taken and where planning happened. Bringing deception right into the heart of war operations worked well: only in the place where the most truths were known could the best lies be formulated. The Prime Minister took a keen interest in LCS’s work. Sefton Delmer, the psychological warrior of black propaganda, would also become a frequent visitor. From the summer of 1942 until victory the whole machinery of British deception began to synchronise and work together to keep the Axis guessing about where and when the next blow would fall.