Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  When Dudley Clarke left London for Portugal on 12 October 1941, after his meeting with the chiefs of staff, he had every reason to feel both proud and successful; he had been listened to with great respect; he had been offered the top job, and turned it down. Now he was going to Lisbon to continue misinforming the Abwehr that Auchinleck would not be ready to attack in North Africa until after Christmas 1941. Clarke was preparing the ground for the story that agent CHEESE would be sending over the radio in late October: to wit, the fiction that Auchinleck’s CRUSADER offensive was off because three British divisions – one armoured, two infantry – had to go to the Caucasus to help the Russians, who were now battling the huge German invasion. Wavell was said to be leaving India to lead the three divisions. The whole thing seemed to make sense. The British had quashed the revolt in Iraq, dealt with Syria and then, at the end of August, moved into Persia, thus securing the Iranian oilfields. Logically, their next primary military focus might well have been to focus on the Caucasus. Clarke’s job was to persuade the Axis that the Allies were about to do just that, rather than poised to make a move in North Africa.

  But when the head of ‘A’ Force went to Madrid, presumably to spread the same plausible rumours through Spanish channels, he came a mighty cropper. The secretive activities that had always worked for him now came unstuck in a most ridiculous manner, and Clarke almost lost everything. The incident remains to a degree mysterious even today, partly because it could only be referred to at the time in an oblique manner, but the bones of what happened are clear.

  Some time in the middle of October 1941, Dudley Clarke was arrested in Madrid dressed in women’s clothes, and detained by the Spanish police. Where exactly, and in what circumstances, is still not known. But the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge holds copies of the four photographs taken of Clarke, which are not at all the usual police mugshots. There are two seated poses, and two full-length where Clarke stands by a table-chair in front of a sheet pinned on the wall of a room with a bare wooden floor. The photos show two different incarnations of the head of ‘A’ Force, Middle East. One is a perfectly conventional fair-haired, middle-aged man in a pinstriped suit, a slightly floppy-collared shirt and a checked bow tie, frowning slightly. The other shows a lipsticked, kohl-eyed ‘woman’, her expression hard to read but possibly a touch defiant and even amused, wearing an elegant, slim-fitting day dress printed with passion flowers and three strands of pearls, perfectly accessorised by dark stockings and high-heeled court shoes, a chic small white handbag and a pale close-fitting turban, the only incongruous note overlarge hands, which are only half-concealed by dark elbow-length ruched satin gloves.

  Guy Liddell of MI5, the Director of Counter Espionage who had last met Clarke riding high in London the month before, rather acidly recorded Clarke’s ‘difficulties’ in his diary for 21 October:

  He has been imprisoned by the Spanish authorities, presumably on his way to Switzerland. I am afraid that after his stay in Lisbon as a bogus journalist he has got rather over-confident about his powers as a secret service agent. It would be much better if these people confined themselves to their proper job.

  How did Clarke get out of police custody? According to Liddell, a man Clarke had contacted earlier in Lisbon, and whom he believed to be a German agent, was in Madrid at the time and saved Clarke’s bacon by telling the Spanish authorities that Clarke was ‘an important agent who was ready to assist the Germans’. Liddell thought that Clarke’s ‘speedy release’ could only be explained ‘by the Germans having intervened on his behalf’.

  The circumstances of his release were to say the least of it peculiar. At the time he was dressed as a woman complete with brassière etc. Why he wore this disguise nobody quite knows. He seems, however, to have played his cards fairly well … Dudley Clarke is now on his way home. Nobody can understand why it was necessary for him to go to Spain. Before he is allowed to go back to the Middle East he will have to give a satisfactory account of himself.

  Once again a supercilious note creeps in. Liddell comments: ‘It may be that [Clarke] is just the type who imagines himself as the super secret service agent.’

  Perhaps Clarke’s sudden pre-eminence in the London meetings of early October had grated on MI5’s Director of Counter Espionage, but Clarke had also crossed a line. The man who was in charge of ‘A’ Force, who knew many British and Allied secrets (including ULTRA) and who had recently been offered the post of Controlling Officer for deception worldwide in the War Cabinet Office, had let himself be caught in suspicious circumstances in the field dressed up as a woman, like the most amateurish agent. It is easy to speculate on the attractions of such risky behaviour from Clarke’s point of view, though he never publicly commented on the incident. We also have to remember the extraordinarily loud black and white plus-fours and checked cap that Clarke had worn when impersonating a journalist on his first arrival in Egypt. His love of theatre since boyhood, his past as a theatrical entrepreneur, performer and stager of pantomimes, could explain his wanting sometimes to dress up and play a part rather than just writing the scripts. This is certainly how Thaddeus Holt sees it, as a kind of comic caper: ‘no more to it than Charley’s Aunt, or d’Artagnan’s escape from Milady’.

  Was there a sexual element in the charade? Clarke never married, but there is no evidence of homosexuality. As early as 1917, as we have seen, when Dudley was still a teenager, he confessed to overwhelming excitement at the vision of women in uniform on motorbikes. The curious detective thriller that Clarke wrote after the war, Golden Arrow (Hodder & Stoughton, 1955), shows persistent and unusually passionate attention to feminine clothing, which the author describes with almost poetic relish and the same obsessive attention to detail that made him a great deception planner. The hero of the novel, Giles Wreford, is a retired colonel rather like Clarke who ran an ‘anti-sabotage’ unit in the war and now does freelance security work. (‘Few ever guessed at the capacity for taking infinite pains which lay well-hidden behind an easy-going exterior.’) Giles loves women, but they frequently annoy him by getting something slightly wrong:

  With all [Paula’s] natural beauty she seemed sadly incapable of acquiring a proper flair for dress … superbly endowed with grey-green eyes and Titian hair, with the long slim legs and the gently-curved figure of a model, she could usually be relied upon to ruin the effect of the most exquisite outfit with some shocking misalliance … Asshe swung proudly into the hall of the hotel, his first glance went straight to the revolting little hat in exactly the wrong shade of mustard.

  Clarke the novelist never forgets the accessories. As in deception operations, the slightest wrong or missing detail may draw attention to itself and bring the whole illusion crashing down. The novel ends with a paean of love for a present from a rich admirer:

  Paula gazed down upon a honey-coloured fur stole nestling in its tissue paper. It was atopaz mink … Infront of the hall mirror she help [ed] the mink to frame itself in silky folds around her …

  Perhaps he took fetishistic pleasure in women’s clothing; perhaps he also sometimes enjoyed wearing it; perhaps dressing up as a woman really did seem to him the best way of disguising his identity when making a contact: all three things could be true. He was small (5’ 7” according to his passport) and slight, and with the gloves on he does make quite a plausible woman in the photographs. Or perhaps it was less complicated, and Clarke just wanted to have fun.

  The Germans may have actually sprung Clarke from prison, as Liddell says, but the British naval attaché in Madrid, Alan Hillgarth, who had good relations with the Spanish authorities, certainly helped. Hillgarth worked both for Sir Samuel Hoare, the British Ambassador in Madrid, and for John Godfrey, the director of Naval Intelligence in London, and managed to thwart Italian and German machinations in Spain while maintaining all the diplomatic proprieties of formal Spanish neutrality. Certainly it was Hillgarth who obtained and sent to London the Spanish police photographs of Clarke, both in drag and out of it, where they we
re circulated as far as Churchill himself (who took a personal interest in Clarke’s escapade). They aroused considerable interest and, reading between the lines of the memos, some amusement:

  Dear Thompson,

  Herewith some photographs of Mr Dudley Wrangel Clarke as he was when arrested and after he had been allowed to change. I promised them to the Prime Minister and thought you might like to see them too.

  Yours ever,

  Alan Hillgarth

  It was probably Alan Hillgarth who conveyed Clarke safely back to British territory in Gibraltar, from where Clarke was recalled to London to explain himself; in other ways, too, his troubles were not yet over. The next convoy’s sailing from Gibraltar was delayed. Enemy submarines had just sunk a British tanker and a freighter in the Atlantic west of Gibraltar, and the Royal Navy sent out a dozen warships to conduct anti-U-boat sweeps. The Admiralty knew from decoding German wireless traffic that a group of six U-boats, code-named Breslau, were deployed in the approaches to the Straits of Gibraltar. One had been sunk by the British and the others had withdrawn, but only temporarily, to the west where four Italian submarines were also lurking. They had certainly not given up.

  Convoy HG-75, comprising eighteen merchant ships, left Gibraltar for Britain at 4 p.m. on 22 October. Dudley Clarke was on the Ariosto, a new merchantman out of Hull which was carrying the convoy’s commodore and a cargo of cork and ore. The ships were escorted by three British destroyers; nine other Royal Navy warships of the 37th Escort Group had sailed ahead an hour and half earlier to hunt for U-boats. But German agents in Ceuta and Algeciras immediately signalled the departure of the convoy to the commander of the U-boats and within half an hour the U-boats knew too.

  As the ships headed into the Atlantic, the British destroyers escorting the convoy were alerted that enemy submarines were around by their own pinging sonar echoes coming off the submarine hulls and by ‘Huff-Duff’ from the Admiralty. The High Frequency Direction Finder or HF/DF system located enemy submarines via high-frequency, short-burst radio transmissions which they could only make on the surface. When Allied listening stations in Britain, Canada and the Caribbean detected a high-frequency German submarine signal, they drew a line on the map to it. The intersection of several of these ‘cuts’ gave a rough location. On the second night out, two British corvettes from the 37th Escort Group had just finished chasing a sonar contact when there was a red explosion at the rear of the convoy. The destroyer HMS Cossack, astern of the port wing, had been torpedoed by U-563 about 250 miles west of Gibraltar. The destroyer’s bridge was blazing fiercely and its short-range ammunition was exploding in the heat. Cold men on oval Carley Float life rafts sang in a darkness illuminated by their burning ship. HMS Carnation picked up forty-nine survivors.

  Six hours later, in the darkness before the dawn of 24 October, U-564, skippered by 25-year-old Reinhard Suhren, fired five torpedoes at the convoy and then escaped. The torpedoes hit three separate British cargo ships at ten-second intervals, the Carsbreck, the Alhama and the Ariosto, which was carrying Dudley Clarke. Carsbreck, loaded with 6,000 tons of iron ore, sank like a stone within a minute. Alhama lingered for ten minutes before foundering in a sea made chiaroscuro by the escort ships firing star shells and fierce white flares called ‘snowflakes’ high into the sky. On the Ariosto, six men died in the explosion, but the forty-five other crew and passengers had five minutes to get to the boats and rafts before the ship went down. As he scrambled to escape, Clarke wondered if it were true that, being born with a caul over his head, he was not meant to drown. Most of the Ariosto survivors were picked up by a Swedish ship, but Clarke was among the seven rescued by the British destroyer HMS Lamberton. He was lucky in more ways than one. The Lamberton ran low on fuel chasing the U-boats and was forced to double back to Gibraltar, together with its unexpected passenger. By the end of October, Clarke was restored to the Rock. The breathing space seems to have given the authorities in London time to calm down about the incident in Spain. People in high places may also have realised that there had been a risk of Clarke drowning when the Ariosto went down, taking with him the secrets of many plans not yet executed, or of his being captured by the Germans, with even more frightful results. His value to the war effort may therefore have suddenly become clearer. All this allowed Clarke to bargain with fate.

  A message from Sir John Dill to Churchill on 31 October records that Clarke had sent a telegram to London the night before telling them about the torpedoing and asking ‘whether he is still to come back to U.K.’ or whether he should go on to Egypt to return to his duties. It must be remembered that Dill had an old liking for Clarke. In the first weeks of Dill’s appointment as CIGS Clarke had done good service as his military secretary. Now Dill played a central role in finessing Clarke’s return to favour. In the missive to Churchill Dill pointed out that Clarke had already been delayed ‘about a week’ by the ‘mischance’ with the U-boat, and also said that he was ‘wanted in the Middle East’, that is, by Auchinleck, who was ‘in the best position to take proper disciplinary action with knowledge of all the facts’. Dill suggested to Churchill that Clarke could be dealt with out in Gibraltar, where he could be questioned by Field Marshal Lord Gort, Governor of Gibraltar. If Gort considered Clarke’s story ‘reasonable’ and if he found him to be ‘sound in mind and body’, Dill says Gort should ‘send him on to Middle East by first possible aircraft as he is urgently required there’. Churchill approved Dill’s suggestion on 1 November.

  Unsurprisingly, the master of deception indeed managed to convince Lord Gort that he was fit to return to duty. The long report Gort wrote is nowhere to be found, but John Dill’s account of it is recorded in a minute to Churchill on 18 November. Dill advised Churchill that the report was ‘of such length that you certainly should not be bothered to read it’. (Or perhaps Dill thought the report contained damaging information about Clarke.) He told Churchill that ‘the Report clearly shows that Col. Clarke showed no signs of insanity but undertook a foolhardy and misjudged action with a definite purpose, for which he had rehearsed his part beforehand’. Dill’s partial quotation from the covering letter Lord Gort wrote for the report begs some questions, beginning as it does ‘… heseems in all other respects to be mentally stable’. In which respects had Lord Gort judged Clarke not to be mentally stable? The quotation from Gort’s letter continues: ‘We can reasonably expect that this escapade and its consequences will have given him a sufficient shock to make him more prudent in the immediate future.’ Gort accordingly sent Clarke back to the Middle East, and Dill says, ‘We can safely leave it to General Auchinleck to deal with him, both from a disciplinary point of view and as regards further employment in his special role.’

  Churchill’s curiosity was evidently aroused, and he sent Dill’s message straight back with ‘a definite purpose’ underlined and the handwritten question underneath ‘CIGS. What was his purpose? WSC.’ Dill replied, ‘Colonel Dudley Clarke had worked up contact with certain German or German-controlled elements, with a view, later, to their providing a channel for the dissemination of false information which was designed to provide a “cover” for British operations (in the Middle East).’ This seems to have satisfied Churchill; Clarke was sent back to Egypt, and there is no evidence that he was ever disciplined.

  By the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942, the horrors of the World War had spread far beyond the Atlantic Ocean, the deserts of North Africa, and the plains of Western Europe. In June 1941, Nazi Germany had launched BARBAROSSA, attacking the Soviet Union with 150 divisions, and by December German troops were forty miles from Moscow. On 7 December the Japanese launched their crippling air attack on the US Navy at Pearl Harbor and all American bases across the Pacific, before going on to demolish the British and Dutch Empires in the Far East, overrunning Hong Kong and Singapore, and driving the British out of Borneo, Burma and Malaya. This became one of the darkest periods of the whole bloody conflict.

  But the great giants were now in the struggle; the
USA had joined the World War and both they and the USSR were fighting a common enemy. In the endgame, though British brains did their bit, Russian blood and American treasure would bring down the Axis of Germany, Italy and Japan.

  23

  The Garden of Forking Paths

  In December 1941, the month when the USA joined the war against the Axis, a small book of seven short stories appeared in Buenos Aires. The opening tale’s arresting first sentence – ‘I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the meeting of a mirror and an encyclopaedia’ – sounded like a mysterious cipher. The stories were by Jorge Luis Borges, the 42-year-old poet, essayist and librarian who disliked Nazis in Argentina, and consistently wrote in favour of the Allies during WW2. The seventh story, the one which gave the volume its title, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan or ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, is about the mysteries of time, but is also a detective story involving WW1 espionage. Yu Tsun, a Chinese spy in England has to communicate a place name in France to his spymasters in Imperial Germany. He therefore kills a scholar whose surname, Albert, is the same as the town on the Somme, so the newspapers will carry his message to Berlin. ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ was republished in December 1944 together with nine more stories in the momentous volume Ficciones or Fictions. In WW1, camouflage and cubism developed side by side; in WW2, deception grew into an infinitely branching series of Borgesian fictions.