Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  Meanwhile, the British consulate had buried Major Martin in Huelva Roman Catholic Cemetery on 2 May. A wreath was laid from ‘Pam’ and the family, then later a flat marble slab, inscribed

  William Martin

  Born 29th March 1907

  Died 24th April 1943

  Beloved son of John

  Glyndwr Martin

  and the late Antonia Martin of

  Cardiff, Wales

  Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori

  RIP

  This gravestone has more recently been amended at the foot:

  Glyndwr Michael

  served as Major

  William Martin, RM

  Glyndwr Michael is one of the few civilians in the Roll of Honour on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website. His Additional Information box reads:

  Mr Michael posthumously served his country during the Second World War under the assumed rank and name of Major William Martin, Royal Marines, date of death given as 24th April. These details are recorded on the original ledger which marks the grave. History knows him as ‘THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS’.

  The day the ‘drowned’ corpse was buried, the real Allied plan for the invasion of Sicily was at last emerging from the mist. Up until that day, there were still several competing plans for the landings, but General Montgomery cornered Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, Bedell Smith, in a washroom at Allied Forces Headquarters in Algiers and drew a map of Sicily on the steamed-up mirror over a hot-water basin. None of the other plans would work, Monty said. In two months’ time he would land in force with Eighth Army here – indicating the south-east corner – and the Americans here – pointing to the southwest. Months of bickering ended with the meeting of two tense and aggressive men in an Algerian lavatory. Basically, that was it: the terrier and the bulldog agreed.

  And what happened to the deception plan? We know the false information in the briefcase – suggesting operation HUSKY was aimed at Greece – travelled fast up the food chain and had been signalled to Berlin by 9 May 1943. It reached Admiral Dönitz and General Keitel, and Adolf Hitler himself. Admiral Canaris, in charge of the Abwehr, discussed it with Propaganda Minister Goebbels. MINCEMEAT thus played its role valiantly in the overall BARCLAY deception. And BARCLAY was a great success. Hitler sent 1st Panzer division from France to Kalamata in Greece in May and ordered General Rommel to Salonika to defend Greece, not Sicily, in July. German torpedo boats were ordered from Sicily to the Aegean; three new minefields were laid there and shore batteries installed.

  All, naturally, to no avail, for on 10 July the Anglo-American Armies, Monty’s Eighth and Patton’s Seventh, landed in Sicily and took the island in thirty-eight days, not the ninety they expected. Mussolini was deposed; Italy surrendered in September.

  In June 1943, Juan Pujol (GARBO) had just been entrusted with the Abwehr’s newest, high-grade cipher. Everything seemed to be going well when an unexpected crisis threatened the work he was doing with what even the sober Official History of MI5 called ‘passionate and quixotic zeal’. The crisis was what the British police term ‘a domestic’. Pujol’s wife Araceli Gonzales and his infant son had joined him in England in the summer of 1942, but a year later she was fed up and missing her mother badly. Tomás Harris, GARBO’S case officer and coauthor, described Mrs Pujol as ‘highly emotional and neurotic’ and as ‘a hysterical, spoilt and selfish woman [who was] nevertheless, intelligent and astute and probably entered into her husband’s work because it was dangerous and exciting’. On 22 June Guy Liddell of MI5 recorded in his contemporaneous diary: ‘Mrs GARBO is extremely homesick and jealous of GARBO who is completely absorbed in his work and has consequently to some extent neglected her.’ Mrs Garbo was, in fact, desperate to go home.

  What had happened was a flaming row between husband and wife on the evening of the 21st. Pujol did not want to go to dinner with some Spanish people at the Spanish Club, thinking their links to the Spanish embassy might be dangerous. Mrs Pujol got very upset, and phoned Harris, threatening to ‘spoil everything’ by revealing all to the Spanish embassy if she did not get her papers to leave the country. Liddell said: ‘She thinks that as the whole of GARBO’S network is notional we have no further use for his services.’

  One of Liddell’s reactions was the ingenious idea of warning the Spanish embassy that a woman of Mrs Pujol’s appearance was intent on assassinating the ambassador. ‘It would however result in the police being called which would be a bore.’ In the event, Pujol/GARBO himself came up with an even more brilliant and theatrical solution, which he got Harris and his colleagues to help him enact.

  After her husband had gone to work on the following morning, the 22nd, Mrs Pujol received a telephone call and was told she would have a decision about her papers by 7 p.m. that night. In fact, at about 6 o’clock two CID officers turned up at her house with a note from Pujol saying that he had been arrested and was in a police cell: could she please pack his sponge bag and pyjamas? She became hysterical and rang Harris, in tears, pleading that her husband had always been loyal and was ready to sacrifice himself for the cause, so why was he arrested? Harris gravely explained that ‘the British Secret Service’ was perfectly prepared to accede to her request to return to Spain, but they had had to ask her husband to write a letter breaking off contact with the Germans, in order to protect British interests against his wife’s threatened ‘betrayal’ to the Spanish. Pujol, Harris said, had protested that he would rather go to prison than sign such a letter. At the mention of betrayal, Pujol had become abusive and violent and had to be arrested on disciplinary grounds. His wife said he was behaving just as she expected him to behave; Pujol loved his secret work, and was only trying to protect her.

  Later that night there were more hysterics. The man who operated the wireless that communicated with Madrid was summoned to the house and found Mrs Pujol in the kitchen with the gas taps turned on. Harris thought this was play-acting, but there was a 10 per cent chance of an accident, so Harris’s wife Hilda spent the night in the house to keep an eye on her. The next day, at her request, Mrs Pujol was formally interviewed. Nervously weeping, she pleaded that what had happened was all her fault. If her husband was pardoned, she would never interfere again, never again ask to go back to Spain.

  At 4 p.m. a car picked her up and drove her to Kew Bridge and then on in a closed Black Maria police van to a Victorian mansion by Ham Common. Latchmere House, a former hospital for ‘shell-shock’ officers in WW1 with at least one padded cell, was now the barbed-wire-enclosed Camp 020, where Nazi spies were held and questioned. The commandant and chief interrogator was the colourful Lieutenant Colonel Robin Stephens, nicknamed ‘Tin Eye’ for his steely monocle. Mrs Pujol was taken inside, and her blindfold removed. Her husband was brought to her, unshaven, wearing Camp 020 uniform. The first question he asked his wife to answer, on her word of honour, was if she had gone to the Spanish embassy. She swore she had only used it as a threat to get him to pay her more attention, and told him she had signed a confession taking all the blame on herself. Pujol said he was facing a tribunal in the morning, but hoped to convince the judges she had never really intended going to the Spanish embassy. She left Camp 020 more composed, but still weeping. The next day Mrs Pujol was told by a chief of the security service that her husband would be allowed to continue his work, but was warned against any repeat behaviour. She returned home chastened and never gave any trouble thereafter.

  That day, 24 June, is the Fiesta de San Juan (St John’s Day), and when Juan Pujol came back home on the evening of his saint’s day, he gave his wife a copy of a statement he had supposedly made. GARBO had composed a small masterpiece in defence of a poor, weaponless woman and the hot pride of a Spaniard insulted by the taint of treason, ending:

  I know that I am appealing to a chivalrous Tribunal and I trust in their decision … fortunately this country, innocent of artifice and subterfuge, controls with scrupulous legality the common weal of her people and of those who collaborate with them.
<
br />   The three-dimensional brilliance of this swiftly improvised deception shows how unnervingly good Pujol had by now become at his job, even when the person to be duped was his own wife. In his 1985 autobiography, Garbo, written with Nigel West, Pujol conceals the fact that he was ever married.

  It was Winston Churchill who really started off the posthumous celebrity of operation MINCEMEAT or ‘The Man Who Never Was’. As Prime Minister he was the one who gave permission for it, and he spellbound dinner parties afterwards with the story. One of those who heard it was Churchill’s friend Duff Cooper, the hedonistic former diplomat and Minister of Information who became a liaison link with the Free French and then British Ambassador in Paris.

  Cooper turned the story of the deceptive corpse into his first and only novel, the bittersweet Operation Heartbreak, published by Rupert Hart-Davis in November 1950. It is a story of accidental heroism, of a decent chap who loves his regiment and longs to serve his country in WW2 but is dogged by ill luck and misses out on the action. His death from pneumonia redeems his failure in life, for providence leads his corpse to be used in a military deception that will save thousands of lives. It was an instantaneous success, selling 30,000 copies by Christmas; the US film rights went for $40,000. ‘Faint resistance was offered by certain branches of the secret service,’ wrote Cooper in his diary, ‘but I was able to overcome them.’ He told them he had the story from Churchill himself and would say so if they tried to prosecute him for breaching security. Dennis Wheatley thought the book would have led to jail for anyone but a friend of Churchill’s.

  Less than three years later, in January 1953, a right-wing journalist called Ian Colvin, who had contacts with former German intelligence officers, started making enquiries in Madrid, Gibraltar and southern Spain about the body of a British officer that had washed up ten years before, in wartime, carrying important papers. Clubland gossip had convinced him that Duff Cooper’s novel was based on truth, and indeed the name he found on a grave in Huelva cemetery, William Martin, was not a million miles from Willie Maryngton, Duff Cooper’s fictional character. Colvin prepared to publish a book investigating the British deception operation, to be called The Unknown Courier. The Joint Intelligence Committee (‘very unsportingly’ Professor R. V. Jones thought), decided to hold back Colvin’s account and gave Ewen Montagu, formerly of Naval Intelligence but now back in the law as a QC and judge, permission to write an officially approved account of his role in the ruse. It was a spoiling operation against what Montagu smugly called ‘the possible dangers and disadvantages which might result from publication by partially informed writers’. But as a result, the tiny operation MINCEMEAT became the best-known British deception of the war.

  Montagu says that he wrote The Man Who Never Was in one weekend. He was helped by Jack Garbutt of the Sunday Express, which serialised the story before it came out and helped make the book a big hit in 1953. ‘The Goons’ spoofed it on their zany radio show, which was about as popular as you could get. 1953 was Coronation year, which gave a sense of renewal, of old matters being turned over afresh. A collection of ‘ancient’ bones known as the Piltdown Man was revealed to be a forgery, so the scientific intelligentsia were intrigued by deception. When Ronald Neame turned The Man Who Never Was into a BAFTA-winning black and white film in 1956 (‘the strangest military hoax of World War II’ said the Cinemascope poster) with a saturnine Clifton Webb playing Montagu, and Montagu himself playing someone else on the Double Cross Committee, the scriptwriter Nigel Balchin gingered up the plot with two sinister Irishmen (Stephen Boyd and Cyril Cusack) spying for the Germans, and the Goon Peter Sellers imitated the growling voice of Churchill. By this time, fact and fiction and fictionalised fact were inextricably entangled. The British love their gardens of forking paths.

  26

  The Double

  In a well-known piece, Borges y yo, ‘Borges and Myself’, Jorge Luis Borges comments that he likes Robert Louis Stevenson’s writing, and that the other Borges, the famous one he has to live with, also enjoys it, but in a show-offy way, like an actor. In another piece, Borges reflects on Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, pointing out the difference between the book itself and the film versions that followed. Whereas the films concentrate on dramatic transformation scenes in which one man splits into two, the book is really about how two separate men turn out to be one and the same (unstable) person. ‘He, I say – I cannot say, I.’

  Like Borges, Dudley Clarke also loved the cinema; deceivers appreciate a really good performance and a convincing mise en scène. Working late at night, Dudley Clarke spent hours at Cairo’s many cinemas, seeing the same films again and again, meeting with associates in the noisy privacy of the auditorium, sometimes dictating letters, other times staring at the screen. Movies seemed to help him to think and to imagine new deceptions.

  In January 1944 Clarke watched Five Graves to Cairo, a romantic melodrama of the recent desert warfare in North Africa. A British corporal, John Bramble, staggers delirious out of the Western Desert to find shelter in a hotel. When the hotel is commandeered by the Germans as the billet for General Rommel, Bramble impersonates a waiter just killed in an air raid, who turns out to have been an undercover German spy. The plot turns on Bramble’s finding out that the five ‘graves’ between Tobruk and Cairo are actually Axis supply dumps, allowing him to thwart German plans to conquer Egypt.

  Clarke was fascinated by the sinister panache of the actor playing Erwin Rommel. ‘Count Erich von Stroheim und Nordenwall’ he called himself, and he was apparently a scion of Austrian nobility. In fact he was the son of a Jewish hatmaker from Vienna who completely reinvented himself when he came to America in 1909. Von Stroheim made his name playing sneering, cruel German officers in WW1 propaganda films (The Hun Within), became a noted silent film director (Blind Husbands, Greed, The Merry Widow) and then an actor specialising in arrogant Prussians (as in Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion).

  Seeing Erich von Stroheim playing Rommel gave Clarke a brilliant idea. Maybe one man could actually be two men, in two places at once. What if an actor impersonated Rommel’s rival, Bernard Montgomery? The month before, December 1943, Eisenhower had been with some fanfare appointed supreme commander of OVERLORD, the proposed ‘liberating assault’ on Western Europe to destroy Nazi Germany, while Montgomery was quietly made commander of the British 21st Army Group and acting commander of all land forces in the amphibious invasion of Normandy, code-named NEPTUNE. Early in 1944, Monty was back in the UK, but he was not the kind of man to live somewhere peacefully in mufti as he was supposed to. He took a suite at Claridges Hotel and, when spotted in full uniform in a box at London’s Palladium Theatre, stood for a five-minute ovation. Dennis Wheatley found such behaviour ‘vainglorious’, but it did make Montgomery readily recognisable.

  What if the well-known figure of Monty were to show up and show off in Gibraltar, Algiers and Cairo? Dudley Clarke knew that would divert Axis attention away from the Channel, where the real Allied attacks would shortly be coming, and back to the Mediterranean.

  Operation COPPERHEAD got underway in the spring of 1944. Lieutenant Meyrick Clifton James was a professional actor who had started out with Fred Karno and now occasionally performed with the Pay Corps Drama and Variety Group, but he had one talent he did not need to work on: he had once rescued a patriotic show in Leicester just by donning a black beret and a British warm (overcoat) and walking out on the stage. In this garb Clifton James was indistinguishable from General Montgomery, the victor of El Alamein, and the whole audience clapped and cheered for five minutes. In March 1944, the News Chronicle ran a photo and a brief story about this remarkable resemblance; when Dudley Clarke’s idea was put into action, someone in MI5 remembered it. James was traced to Leicester, and that was why a middle-aged lieutenant in the Royal Army Pay Corps received a telephone call out of the blue from the famous British film star David Niven, innocently asking him to take part in some army films.

  I Was Monty’s
Double by M. E. Clifton James (ghosted with the help of Gerald Langston Day) was published in June 1954, ten years after the events it describes and the year after the publication of The Man Who Never Was. It is the study of a self-conscious performance: a rather shy man with no natural authority has to play an incredibly assertive man of magnetic personality. From the first lies that he is forced to tell his wife in the name of Official Secrecy, James sees things in theatrical terms, as a story of stage fright and elusive confidence. ‘Only those who have been on this deception work can realize quite how nerve-wracking it can be.’ His astute MI5 handlers are like the producer, the stage director, the stage manager, and he is surprised by their sense of humour, the fun they are having and their skill at mimicry. He finds himself among a cast of people who seem to change their rank and their uniforms with bewildering ease. While watching the real Montgomery at a coastal rehearsal for D-Day he is overcome with a sense of unreality, yet Monty seems to be acting too:

  On the stage I have seen even rank bad actors and singers get away with it because they had personality, and I have seen really competent artistes without personality who could get nowhere at all. This man was what we should call a ‘natural’ … He would have made a fortune on the stage, I thought. Here in this great war drama he had carefully chosen his cast, appointed the cleverest directors, managers, technicians and property men, and from the leads down to the walk-on people he was making certain that everyone knew his part.

  The army on active service reminded James of the theatrical profession and the times when a cast stale from weeks of rehearsing finds itself in the ‘dead spot’ before opening. The show feels a flop and the run looks short, but then a producer comes in and with a few quiet words switches on cheerful confidence again. What James most admired about Monty was the way he could inspire people, ‘us [ing] his showmanship to brilliant effect,’ James says. Because Eighth Army distrusted ‘Brass-hats’, Monty stuck a black beret on his head ‘and talked to Pit and Gallery in a way that no General in the field had ever talked before’.