Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  Delmer was caught up with many ‘syke-warrior’ schemes designed to break the enemy will to resist. Although a small group of aristocratic army officers had attempted to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, there was no organised resistance to Nazism inside Germany. So it seemed like a good idea in 1945 to invent an imaginary resistance and send them some real agents (‘turned’ German PoWs), wirelesses, stores, explosives and secret messages in order to rattle the Gestapo and make them waste their time persecuting innocent people. Four agents survived and two of them claimed to have contacted a subversive organisation which did not actually exist. (David Garnett says that operation PERIWIG ‘resembles the subject of many plays by Pirandello’.) The most cynical duplicity was alleged by Leo Marks in his book Between Silk and Cyanide – the deliberate dropping of a German double agent called Schiller with a sabotaged parachute so that a fresh corpse could be found with incriminating evidence. Marks says that this brutal version of MINCEMEAT was fixed by Major General Gerald Templer, but Fredric Boyce in SOE’s Ultimate Deception: Operation PERIWIG (2005) is more sceptical about whether it happened. Ultimately, Delmer thought that the invented resistance gave camouflage to the wrong people. He called his subsequent book Black Boomerang because after the war so many Germans who were committed Nazis or staunch collaborators claimed to have been in the fictional resistance he had partly helped to invent.

  As the Third Reich continued to crumble and Allied forces moved deeper into Germany, Sefton Delmer felt the time for the Soldatensender was over. He decided to do what he had reported other Germans as doing: abandon ship. At 5.59 a.m. on 14 April 1945 the radio station ‘faded from the ether, never to be heard again’, and almost the same day, the last edition of his newspaper Nachrichten was printed in Luton. The morning after the fancy-dress party in Milton Bryan to celebrate the final broadcast, Delmer performed another ritual and shaved off his beard, to symbolise what he called ‘the end of “black”.’ He was shocked by what he saw in the mirror. ‘There, staring at me, was the pallid, flabby-mouthed face of a crook. Was this, I asked myself, what four years of “black” had done to Denis Sefton Delmer?’ Clean-shaven, he summoned his team in the canteen to say goodbye. A voice from the back of the room called: ‘Der Bart is ab! Der Krieg ist aus!’ – the beard is off, the war is over.

  But Delmer also had a serious point in calling the meeting. He told them all that they must resist the temptation to boast about the tricks they had played on the Germans. He said that although the unit had ‘within our limits, contributed our bit to the defeat of Hitler’, they must remember that their role was ‘purely subsidiary’ to the work of the fighting services. He was being modest, and advising modesty, for a reason. He reminded his team that after WW1, Lord Northcliffe, ‘hungry for public glory’, could not restrain himself from boasting how successful his propaganda had been. This had only fed the German propaganda myth that they were beaten ‘not by the armies in the field, but by Northcliffe’s propaganda’, which in turn fostered the illusion that the Germans could have won had they not been deceived – in which case, why not ‘have a second go’?

  Delmer’s fictions ended in the same month, April 1945, that Allied soldiers discovered the realities of Nazism in Germany. They entered the concentration camps of Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. ‘No one will believe us,’ a stunned GI said after seeing the ovens and the corpses. Richard Dimbleby was the first British radio reporter into Belsen where 60,000 civilians were dying of hunger and typhus.

  I have seen many terrible sights in the last five years, but nothing, nothing approaching the dreadful interior of this hut at Belsen. The dead and dying lay close together … As we went deeper into the camp, further from the main gate we saw more and more of the horrors of the place … Far away in the corner of Belsen camp there is a pit the size of a tennis court. It is fifteen feet deep and piled to the very top with naked bodies that have been tumbled in one on top of the other … Our Army doctors, examining some of the bodies, found in their sides a long slit, apparently made by someone with surgical knowledge. They made enquiries and established beyond doubt that in the frenzy of their starvation, the people of Belsen had taken the wasted bodies of their fellow prisoners and removed from them the only remaining flesh – the liver and kidneys – to eat.

  The BBC, in disbelief, was initially reluctant to broadcast his dispatch. But Dimbleby telephoned the News Room and said that if they did not put it out he would never broadcast again.

  Adolf Hitler in his bunker in devastated Berlin chose not to face a war crimes tribunal. He wept as he poisoned his Alsatian dog, Blondi. Then, after lunch on 30 April, the Führer took out his false teeth and sucked on a cold pistol. Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally on 7 May 1945.

  Epilogue

  The story of British deceiving in WW2 emerged piecemeal, and late. The official history, Strategic Deception in the Second World War, by Professor Sir Michael Howard, was published in 1990, a full ten years after its completion. This was because the Prime Minister in 1980, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, wanted no more publicity about the secret services after the revelations that Sir Anthony Blunt had been passing information to the Russians. The MI5 Summary of the Garbo Case 1941–1945 was not published until 2000. The most comprehensive account of Allied military deception, The Deceivers, by Thaddeus Holt, only appeared in 2004.

  Why did we have to wait so long to learn about this aspect of WW2? Is it because deception is the most secret thing, or the most shameful? Official Secrecy has weighed heavy on the subject. The 1972 book that revealed the WW2 use of double agents, J. C. Masterman’s The Double-Cross System (first published by Yale University Press in the USA), excised all mention of ‘Most Secret Sources’, information derived from deciphered enemy codes, itself code-named ULTRA. This did not come to public knowledge until F. W. Winterbotham’s dambusting book The Ultra Secret was published in 1974. For three decades, the story of Bletchley Park’s great success at breaking the German Enigma machine codes had been strictly verboten. Even Winston Churchill kept to the rules, so in his six-volume history, The Second World War, the one man who really grasped the importance of SIGINT could say nothing about it at all.

  There were two reasons for the official Anglo-American policy of continuing deep secrecy after 1945. The first, clearly, was not to reveal anything about the range and capacity of modern signals intelligence, because the Cold War against Communism had now begun. The second reason was not to give the defeated Axis nations any excuse to complain, as Germany had after WW1, that they only lost because the victors cheated. Books like The Secrets of Crewe House by Sir Campbell Stuart, in boasting of British propaganda skills, had only encouraged the Nazis to rewrite history.

  Some stories did get out despite the official policy. Books have always been a way of pushing against the various Defence of the Realm and Official Secrets Acts passed since 1914, and in the first years after WW2, secrets emerged not as history but as adventure stories. As we have seen, Duff Cooper’s novel Operation Heartbreak eventually led to the non-fiction accounts of MINCEMEAT, The Unknown Courier and The Man Who Never Was, in 1953. The Joint Intelligence Committee probably allowed these accounts of a British deception triumph to come out to counter a story of German success in the deception field published earlier in 1953. The cover of H. J. Giskes’s London Calling North Pole promised ‘An Incredible Disclosure by the Former Chief of German Counter-Espionage in Holland’, and Giskes revealed that all British secret agents sent into wartime Holland by SOE were captured and had their radio sets taken over by the Abwehr, in an eighteen-month deception operation called Nordpol. Britain could not let Germany win at Funkspiele or ‘radio games’, hence the propaganda need for stories that showed the British secret war in a good light.

  Brigadier Dudley Clarke retired from the British Army in 1947, having written the narrative war diary of ‘A’ Force, 1940–45. From 1948 to 1952, he was head of public opinion research in the Conservative Central Office and for a time a director of Se
curicor Ltd. He kept in touch with his former deceivers, lending to some of the more penurious moneys which were not returned. After Seven Assignments in 1948, Clarke wrote a history of the 11th Hussars 1934–1945, The Eleventh at War, and the mild security thriller Golden Arrow, which came out in 1955. But he never achieved the fame of his film-writer brother, T. E. B. Clarke, because he was not allowed to publish what he really knew. Dudley Clarke wanted to write The Secret War in 1953, but it never got beyond a publisher’s proposal because of the Official Secrets Act, which he dutifully obeyed until his death in 1977.

  Sir Winston Churchill, meanwhile, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, was making millions from his writing, having taken rather more government documents with him than he should have done when he left. ‘The way to command history,’ he once remarked, ‘is to write it yourself.’ Re-elected Prime Minister once again in October 1951, a month short of his 77th birthday, Churchill was not immune to deception. After the old man had a massive stroke, the press was squared, the doctors hushed and the political class coopted so his incapacity was hidden from the people. Churchill was a national icon whose image was not to be tarnished by his own feebleness and occasional petulance. Churchill finally resigned as PM in April 1955 and, after six decades as an MP, retired from Parliament in 1964. He died on 24 January 1965, at the age of 9o, and his impressive and moving state funeral brought down the final curtain on the British Empire. In 2002, BBC TV viewers voted the saviour of his country the greatest Briton ever.

  Revisionism usually takes a generation. Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was not published in the Victorian era or the Edwardian, but the Georgian. Twenty years after his death in 1935, T. E. Lawrence came under attack from Richard Aldington, a writer and critic disillusioned by WW1 and determined to attack any class-bound romanticism that camouflaged its horrors. Richard Aldington’s Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry indicts T. E. Lawrence as a fraud and fantasist; what it lacks in accuracy, it makes up for in invective. Lawrence l’Imposteur (as it was called on first publication in Paris) caused a furore when it came out in England in 1955, and a powerful cabal, headed by Basil Liddell Hart, first tried to suppress, then denigrate it.

  One man who read Richard Aldington’s book attentively (especially the chapter about Lawrence’s sexuality) was Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, DSO, the WW1 deceiver who by then was a white-bearded old gentleman in his seventies. From 1957 to 1964 Meinertzhagen published four books apparently drawn from the transcriptions of his seventy-six volumes of diaries, including Kenya Diary, Army Diary and Middle East Diary. Just as he was becoming a forgotten figure, he constructed his own larger-than-life legend, full of swaggering violence. Yet he was mostly famed as a bird man. In 1951, the British Ornithologists’ Union gave him their Godman Salvin Medal, and in 1957 he was made a CBE for his services to ornithology. The American Ornithologists’ Union also made him an honorary fellow, a rare distinction. His lifetime achievements included the amassing of one of the finest private collections in the world, including 25,000 bird skins and half a million mallophaga or feather-chewing lice parasites, which he donated to the British Museum (Natural History) in 1954, where it is still kept intact.

  But Richard Meinertzhagen was a poacher. To create his collection, he had secretly stolen specimens from other private collectors and from the scientific collections of great institutions around the world. His last ornithology book, Pirates and Predators, a detailed ethological study of bird cheats and robbers, was in fact a disguised autobiography.

  In 1993, twenty-five years after Richard Meinertzhagen’s own death, Alan Knox, then of the Buckinghamshire County Museum, pointed out some blatant anomalies in Meinertzhagen’s collection of Acanthis finches. Knox was the first person brave enough to suggest quite bluntly in a scholarly article that the colonel had been dishonest about how he got his specimens. Other scholars also uncovered deceptions relating to his ‘finds’. ‘It was a nuisance,’ Alan Knox told me (with typical British understatement) from the University of Aberdeen in August 2005. ‘Meinertzhagen corrupted the information which misled many people for a very long time.’

  Nor was it only birds. Knox pointed me towards a critique published in 1995 by J. N. Lockman. This focuses on twelve entries relating to T. E. Lawrence in Meinertzhagen’s Middle East Diary 1917–1956. It shows that those entries were not contemporaneous, but were inserted into the typescript after 1955 when the author had read Aldington’s book. These entries were all disparaging to Lawrence’s manhood, and are clearly Meinertzhagen’s belated revenge for the way Lawrence had described him in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, as a man ‘who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving … as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans’.

  The first two biographies of Meinertzhagen, Duty, Honor, Empire by John Lord and Warrior by Peter Hathaway Capstick, were admiring hagiographies; his third, by Mark Cocker in 1989, although edged with doubt, gave him the benefit of it. But his fourth utterly demolishes him: Brian Garfield’s The Meinertzhagen Mystery (2007) is subtitled The Life and Times of a Colossal Fraud. Thus the whirligig of time brings in its revenges. Lawrence’s reputation is to a great extent restored, but Meinertzhagen is exposed for what he was.

  How easy was it to escape from deception once the war was over? The camoufleur Basil Spence kept his promise and built his cathedral at Coventry, and David Strangeways took Holy Orders and became a canon in the Church of England. The singular and secular Sefton Delmer wanted to start ‘a journalistic revolution in Germany’ by establishing a vigorous free press in place of the existing turgid German hackery. But occupied Germany was in the grip of a rigid British control commission and he left disgruntled to return to Fleet Street and his roving job as chief correspondent for the Daily Express. He finally quit Lord Beaverbrook’s employment after a quarrel about expenses. ‘I can only think clearly in a five-star hotel,’ Delmer is said to have said. ‘Is that it?’ he demanded of the apparatchik who fired him. ‘After thirty years?’ ‘Yes, that’s it.’ ‘Well, if I’d known the job was temporary I wouldn’t have taken it.’

  Delmer broke his own injunction to the Soldatensender team not to reveal their secrets and talk about black propaganda when he wrote the second volume of his autobiography, Black Boomerang, in 1962, describing his life in ‘black’ radio. But nine years later, when he tried to go one further by writing a colourful account of strategic deception in WW2, mainly about GARBO and D-Day, he ran into problems because he drew on a secret history of FORTITUDE written for MI5 by Roger Hesketh that had been shown him clandestinely. Eventually a deal was done: Roger Hesketh, John Bevan and even Dudley Clarke were given a hand in editing Sefton Delmer’s book The Counterfeit Spy. This was published in 1973 as a true story, but with many of the names changed: the code-name GARBO became ‘CATO’, and the Catalan Juan Pujol became the Basque ‘Jorge Antonio’.

  On 10 January 1978, the BBC broadcast a memorable television ‘Play for Today’ that went on to win a top BAFTA award. Licking Hitler was the fourth play by David Hare. Written, directed and narrated by him, it located in British WW2 secret activities the seeds of post-war corruption and dishonesty. Licking Hitler begins with an unworldly upper-class English girl, Anna Seaton, arriving to work in an English country house where a Black Propaganda Unit is preparing a robust talk about the defection of Rudolf Hess for a ‘black’ radio station called Otto Abend Eins. There is a devious political character from PWE who seems based on Richard Crossman, and a pragmatist who in some ways resembles Ian Fleming. The parallel figure to Sefton Delmer in this ‘black’ unit is Archie Maclean, a brilliant, savage, alcoholic, working-class Scot who writes lies to fool the Germans by day and has brutal sex with Anna by night. Hare’s film is skilfully written, beautifully lit, shot and acted, but to my mind is flawed by a moralistic pseudo-documentary, added at the end, narrating its protagonists’ lives in the decades after the war. Their subsequent failures and dishonesties are all laid at the door of their wartime activities in decepti
on: ‘The lying, the daily inveterate lying, the thirty-year-old corrosive national habit of lying.’

  Tom Delmer himself watched the broadcast of Licking Hitler in some confusion. He was unwell, in bed, suffering the after-effects of a stroke, and the scenes of the ‘black’ broadcasts in German spoke to him, though the deplorable Archie Maclean seemed strange. He knew the BBC had optioned his book Black Boomerang, although it had not paid a full fee for adaptation, and now, as the drama unfolded and what was recognisably his work was disparaged, he wondered if ‘Auntie’ BBC was not somehow getting back at him for those old wartime humiliations.

  Delmer died the following year. His last book, The Counterfeit Spy, had broken an incredible story and ended with what it claimed actually happened to the real people. ‘Jorge Antonio’ was said to have gone to Australia and Canada, eventually settling in Portuguese Angola, where he died of malaria in 1959. But that too was another, deliberate, deception.

  The real Juan Pujol had asked Tomás Harris to let him vanish, so that vengeful neo-Nazis could not hunt him down. In May 1984, he was traced to Venezuela by the historian of intelligence Nigel West, who persuaded him to return to Europe for the fortieth anniversary of D-Day. Juan Pujol MBE was thanked by the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace in London and was finally acknowledged publicly by the British for what he had done.

  Dudley Clarke’s best hope for deception was that ‘The secret war was waged rather to conserve than to destroy … it was able to count its gains from the number of casualties it could avert’. Before he died in Caracas in 1988, Pujol in turn also declared that he was proudest to have helped to protect some of the tens of thousands of Allied servicemen fighting to hold the Normandy beachheads: ‘Many, many more would have perished had our plan failed.’