As the war wound towards its climax, nothing was really what it seemed. Take the brutal lot of British prisoners of war: their regime of mind-numbing routine was, for the bulk of the 140,000 PoWs held in Europe, just that: a hard, hungry, tedious life. Only a small percentage of PoWS tried to escape. But escape remained the Holy Grail, particularly among officers, who did not have to work in their camps, unlike the ‘other ranks’ who were treated like slave labour. These officers felt it was their duty to make things difficult for their captors by trying to get out. So, from time to time the dull prison camp routine was concealing a busy hive of subversive activities. Classic postwar accounts of PoW activities like Eric Williams’s The Wooden Horse (1949) and Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape (1951) focus on dogged British attempts to fool the prison guards or ‘goons’ with an elaborate pretence of normality. A loitering man is really on the alert; a closing window is a signal; behind the false wall is a hiding place; under the lavatory is a wireless set receiving coded messages via the BBC, and so on. ‘Stooges’ keep watch for ‘ferrets’ or ‘snoops’ while artistic and mechanical work goes on – the painstaking forging by hand of correctly stamped, sealed and embossed German ID and travel passes or the tailoring of fake civilian clothes from blankets or uniforms with the nap shaved off. Tiny compasses were engineered from melted gramophone records and 78 rpm needles, and underground railways were put together from bedsteads and beading. As everyone who has seen John Sturges’s film of The Great Escape knows, seventy-six air force officers got out of Stalag Luft III in March 1944. Three reached England, but all the rest were recaptured. Fifty were shot by the Gestapo, on Adolf Hitler’s orders.
The books and films of the 1940s and 1950s imply that the prisoners of war improvised, stole or scrounged everything themselves. Censorship shaped by official secrecy did not allow the authors to tell the whole truth. Prisoners could receive parcels from voluntary and charitable organisations on the outside. (These were not the Red Cross boxes, which had to be respected under the Geneva Conventions.) Some of these charity parcels had blankets, scarves, underwear, clothing, etc., others contained books, puzzles, paper, pencils, playing cards, sports equipment, musical instruments and other entertainments for bored men confined in the Stammlager. Parcels from the Licensed Victuallers’ Sports Association or the Welsh Provident Fund, for example, might contain a box of Monopoly, the property board game with paper play-money and little wooden red hotels and green houses. Made by Waddington’s, these Monopoly sets looked and felt completely kosher. Yet if you peeled away the London streets from Old Kent Road to Mayfair, inside the folding board you might find several useful maps of your part of Germany, printed on silk squares. These Get-Out-of-Jail-Free cards came courtesy of the ingenious Clayton Hutton, technical officer of MI9, the British secret service dedicated to escape and evasion, whose Middle East section Dudley Clarke also ran.
In his remarkable autobiography, Official Secret, Hutton reveals how, as well as designing compact ration packs for airmen who were in danger of being captured by the enemy, he hid compasses in fly-buttons, fretsaws in pencils, and flexible Gigli saws in the bootlaces of flying boots with false heels. He also tells of sending escape aids (from batteries to blades, crystal wireless sets to wire cutters) into the PoW camps hidden inside innocuous items such as cricket bats, skittles or chess sets, and entire maps divided among fifty-two playing cards in a sealed pack. The PoW books and movies of the 1950s and 1960s were never allowed to reveal that one officer on every camp’s ‘escape committee’ would be in regular secret communication with London, so that requests and information could be sent both ways coded in innocent-looking letters from wives, girlfriends, family members.
In particular, these told the prisoners which special parcels to look out for among the innocent ones. German money stitched into book covers, together with the tobacco, cocoa and coffee sent in legitimate food parcels, could be used to bribe guards and for escapers’ expenses. After this method was discovered, the Germans started ripping all the covers off all books, so Hutton arranged for the pressing of special 78 rpm records with money hidden in the centre, under the label around the hole. Among Hutton’s clothing parcels were woollen blankets specially selected with the help of the Wool Association to be easily converted into suits, apparently new issue RAF and Marine uniforms which, once stripped of British insignia, matched Luftwaffe uniforms. There were also packets of handkerchiefs tied up with black and white ribbons that just happened to match those from which Iron Crosses dangled. The ingenuity the British showed in trying to help their men behind the wire was remarkable, and even when the escapes did not work, it kept the Germans on their toes and helped to raise morale.
But MI9 was not the only secret service hiding things. SOE had an entire unit, largely recruited from film-industry buyers, craftsmen and prop-makers, dedicated to camouflaging anything in everything. Section XV was based at the Thatched Barn roadhouse on the Barnet bypass, not far from Elstree Film Studios, and was run by a large genial man called J. Elder Wills who worked with Paul Robeson on Song of Freedom and was involved in the early days of Hammer Films. He made two training films for the Army School of Camouflage, where he also built dummy planes and tanks, before coming to SOE late in 1941 and starting his first workshop in January 1942. Their camouflage section became used to hiding ammunition, stores, weapons and wirelesses or almost anything else in all kinds of boxes. They could hide microfilms and messages virtually anywhere, and they could make sniper suits and hides which exactly matched the foliage of a specific region, or cobble Japanese split-toe boots or sneakers that left an apparently bare footprint, for use in the Far East.
SOE disguised its people with careful copies of authentic refugees’ clothes, taken apart and examined by foreign tailors for cut and stitching and made up by specially recruited seamstresses in London’s garment district south of Oxford Street. Getting the right labels, collars and collar studs, buttons and buttonholes, even drilling off the name ‘Lightning’ on a zip-fastener, were all part of the attention to detail. For the shabbier parts of Europe, clothes and luggage were carefully aged, scuffed and distressed. Realistic foreign identity papers required a forgery section, whose staff of fifty, including several craftsmen whose extensive holidays at His Majesty’s Pleasure meant their credentials were well known to Scotland Yard, produced over 275,000 authentic-looking documents. The make-up section in Knightsbridge provided agents with wigs, gum pads, nose plugs, hair and skin dyes, spectacles, special dentistry and even plastic surgery.
SOE equipped its agents with deadly devices that could have come from Q’s toyshop. There were guns that slid up a sleeve or were hidden in a pen, thumb-knives stitched into a lapel, exploding briefcases and incendiary luggage. They designed a range of bombs and booby traps and tyre bursters that looked like an amazing range of everyday objects, from bicycle pumps and books to tobacco boxes and toothpaste tubes.
The most common disguise for bombs for sabotage use was probably the lump of coal, since this was the usual fuel for train locomotives, boiler houses and power stations. A film-set plasterer called Wally Bull moulded the first fake coal in two plaster halves that were then crimped together around the explosive. Later models had liquid plaster poured around a metal general-purpose explosive charge, so showed no join at all. Section XV produced about 3½ tons of explosive ‘coal’ between 1941 and 1945, as well as 43,700 incendiary or explosive ‘cigarettes’ for SOE agents.
Section XV’s work manufacturing devices and gadgets for the secret armies was keenly examined by King George VI in SOE’s demonstration showroom at the Natural History Museum in London. He thus continued the tradition of his father, who had inspected Wilkinson and Solomon’s camouflage at the Royal Academy and in Hyde Park in WW1.
Borges said that whatever is imagined becomes real. He liked to mix the real with the fantastic, to slip invented books on to the library shelves next to genuine ones, or to have a known writer review an imaginary text, shuffling truth and f
iction just as deceivers like Dudley Clarke and Sefton Delmer did in the war. In his story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, a group of men invent a fantastic ideal world which then begins to intrude into the real one. Peculiar objects called hrönir start materialising. Some are better versions of something that was lost, others were previously unknown. Purest and weirdest are the ur: things produced by suggestion, created by the power of hope.
The eventual meeting between Juan Pujol and British Intelligence seems like just such an intrusion of the fictional into the real. The situation was both serious and absurd. Pujol was living in Lisbon but pretending to be in London for the benefit of his Abwehr controller in Madrid. He had invented an elaborate charade in which he said he had bribed a KLM pilot to bring his secret messages (written in invisible ink in between the lines of ordinary letters) from London to a bank in Portugal where the Germans could pick them up (in fact he wrote and delivered them himself in Lisbon). He had sent his histrionic wife Araceli Gonzales to Madrid to check whether the Abwehr actually believed him. There she pretended to be a jealous wife, saying she knew Pujol was just away having an affair with some tart, thus forcing the Germans to reassure her that, no, he was doing useful work for them in London, and not to worry. The Abwehr really did think that he was a top agent.
By then Pujol was seriously worrying the British. Since October 1941 they had monitored and decrypted his messages at the point when they were transmitted by the Abwehr from Madrid to Berlin. Apparently this ‘Agent ARABEL’ had gained sub-agents in Glasgow, Liverpool and the West Country, and was about to get a job at the BBC. A message that happened to be partially true, about a convoy to Malta, rattled MI5. An Abwehr spy at large in England, neither interned nor turned, could threaten the nineteen double agents that Tar Robertson was already running as well as the whole superstructure of the Double Cross committee. Yet who was this ARABEL or ARABAL? MI5 realised there was something funny about him as an agent. He was unable to understand English pounds, shillings and pence, knew nothing about regiments and said, oddly, that people in Glasgow would do anything ‘for a litre of wine’. Much of his information was patently untrue. Could they be sure this man was not still in Iberia? Lots of the German agents in Lisbon and Madrid lied to get more pay. Might arabel be one of the fantasts?
Meanwhile, Pujol had only heard once from the Abwehr. They wanted many more details about troop movements. Pujol, who barely spoke English, knew nothing about the British military set-up and had no British contacts to help him concoct anything plausible. He was about to give up when either he or his wife had one last try at the American embassy in Lisbon. The USA was two months into the war and the US Naval Attaché, Edward Rousseau, was bright enough to realise he had landed some sort of a fish. Rousseau contacted the British; eventually in February 1942 they put two and two together and realised that Juan Pujol García and arabel were the same man, potentially a most valuable double agent. But who was he going to work for? MI6 wanted him in Lisbon, MI5 wanted him in London – but MI5 won.
Pujol was quietly shipped on a British freighter from Estoril to Gibraltar, from where he flew to England, apprehensive, balding, bearded. When he landed at Plymouth on 24 April, there were two MI5 officers waiting to meet him at the foot of the steps. One was an Englishman, Cyril Mills, who said his name was Mr Grey, and the other was Tomás Harris, a lean dark handsome man with swept back hair who spoke fluent castellano because he was half Spanish. Pujol shook his hand. It was a firm grip. Then Harris put his arm round Pujol’s shoulder in a gesture of protection and friendship. Bienvenido, hombre. This Pujol liked; they trusted each other at once.
Tomás ‘Tommy’ Harris, the wealthy and well-educated son of Lionel Harris, a Jewish picture dealer from Hampstead who knew Solomon J. Solomon, followed his father into picture dealing, became a friend of Anthony Blunt’s and later published a classic account of Goya’s etchings. Soon Harris and Pujol became a key double act of WW2, partners in the creation of fictions, like Borges and Bioy Casares.
Borges’s real-life friend Adolfo Bioy Casares appears on the first page of the fiction ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ as the man who quotes the (invented) heretical saying that ‘mirrors and copulation are abominable because they multiply the numbers of men’. Bioy and Borges first met in 1932 through the Argentine avant-garde magazine Sur, and Bioy was impressed by Borges’s essays, ‘The Postulation of Reality’ (1931) and ‘Narrative Art and Magic’ (1932) which are precisely about how writers get readers to suspend disbelief and accept the illusory truth they have created by skilful use of detail and atmosphere. The pair decided to write parody detective stories together in December 1941.
Meanwhile Pujol and Harris began collaborating in a similar way in London. Working from an office in Jermyn Street and a five-bedroomed MI5 safe house in Crespigny Road, Hendon (a respectable, mostly Jewish neighbourhood), they scripted what was in effect a serial novel or a soap-opera for the Abwehr in which two dozen busy sub-agent characters came and went, rose and fell, busily compiling a farrago of facts, figures and useful information. At the centre of it was the narrator and principal character whom the Germans knew as ARABEL and the British, at first, by the unglamorous code-name BOVRIL. But Pujol was such a good actor that the British soon changed his name from a beef extract to a movie star, GARBO. Pujol grew into his leading role as the top German secret agent in Britain. The character that he and Harris co-wrote was that of a hard-working diva, assiduous, bossy, demanding in the touchy way of ‘talent’, quick to take offence if not assuaged and flattered, pouring out endless thoughts and suggestions in a pompous and flowery Spanish style that is worthy of Borges and Bioy’s creation, H. Bustos Domecq.
Harris’s sister Enriqueta Harris Frankfort later became a world authority on Velázquez and Goya. In WW2 she was working in the Ministry of Information, and fed scraps of detail to Harris and Pujol, who used them to invent an unwitting source of intelligence referred to as J (3). J (3) was supposed to be an official high up in the Spanish section of the Ministry of Information with whom ARABEL/GARBO had been able to ingratiate himself by posing as an exiled Republican writing cheerful propaganda for distribution in Spain. J (3) would become a key source of governmental contacts and ‘secret’ documents for GARBO. Absolutely none of this was real, of course. La vida es sueño, life’s a dream, as they said in the Spanish Golden Age.
24
The Hinge of Fate
In Winston Churchill’s huge narrative history of WW2, the turning point comes in the fourth volume, aptly entitled The Hinge of Fate, which shows that the 1942 North African campaign was a crucial step on the path to victory. 1942 dawned gloomily with military disasters for the Allies everywhere, but ended on a much more promising note. ‘This is not the end,’ said Churchill on 10 November 1942. ‘It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning.’ It was the year when British camoufleurs, British double agents, British military deceivers and British black propagandists fell into step.
In his autobiographical Deceivers Ever: Memoirs of a Camouflage Officer, Steven Sykes (who kept a contemporaneous diary of his ‘scurrying about’ through the Western Desert and European D-Day) noted that things were changing in 1942, but did not quite grasp the importance of the man who came to put them in place.
Early in February a Col Clark [e] appeared – a very spruce senior (and elderly) Staff Officer in an immaculate British camelhair coat. There was an air of mystery about him, and on the 9th I met him for discussions on Wireless Telegraphy for 37 Royal Tank Regiment – also details of Bedouin tent colours. Col Clark [e] wielded deceptive power via wireless messages and agents … it would seem that the tanks of 37 RTR were to become Bedouin tents – a further sign that the deceptive side of desert camouflage was being taken seriously.
Sykes is referring to ‘A’ Force’s deception plan BASTION, which attempted to block Rommel’s advance into Egypt at the beginning of 1942 by making him think he was running into a trap at the Gazala line. Hiding tan
ks in Bedouin tents was an old British trick that Rommel was very well aware of and had even copied. Accordingly, on 15 February Victor Jones put up 150 (in fact empty) tents deep in the desert behind the left wing of the British army, and surrounded them with faked tank tracks, people moving about and lots of dummy wireless traffic.
In March the writer Julian Trevelyan came out to Egypt to report on the new techniques of camouflage in the Middle East for the authorities in the UK. He saw Colonel Geoffrey Barkas, the head of camouflage at GHQ, who told him about the complexity of deception in the desert:
You cannot hide anything in the desert; all you can hope to do is to disguise it as something else. Thus tanks become trucks overnight, and of course trucks become tanks, and the enemy is left guessing at our real strength and intentions. All this involves complex staff work, and Barkas can claim credit for having sold the idea to the high-ups since Wavell’s first advance.
Trevelyan went west in a truck with a dour driver called Jock Harris. They passed burnt-out aeroplanes and overturned German and Italian lorries on the way to bomb-scarred Tobruk and Eighth Army HQ, a scatter of tents and vehicles in a shallow wadi. They visited an armoured brigade in no-man’s-land, navigating by compass through a terrain with no landmarks, thumping and rattling over an endless succession of prickly and stony patches. This was not the Foreign Legion desert of the movies, shifting dunes and plodding camels, but ‘a remorseless plain of glaring stone and dust’. Past ‘Knightsbridge’, a lonely crossroads marked by petrol cans, they pressed on to ‘some tanks dressed up as trucks, and to some old trucks dressed up as tanks, bumping along over the stones with flapping skirts like old Cockney dowagers’.
Churchill's Wizards Page 44
