Poison, Shadow, and Farewell

by Javier Marías

  Wheeler stopped. I thought he must have grown tired again or that his mouth was dry from so much talking. It was incredible how fluently he spoke when his words did not get stuck, even if he had perhaps lapsed again into that strangely introspective loquacity. I wondered when we would return to the young Valerie, forever young and growing daily ever younger than him. I asked him if he would like something to drink, and he said, yes, a glass of water and told me to help myself to whatever I wanted, that I should ask Mrs. Berry to bring it, and he apologized for not having offered me anything before. I replied that I would go to the kitchen myself, preferring not to bother her. I brought him his water and, after opening a cold beer for myself, took the opportunity to satisfy a minor curiosity:

  'Was black propaganda also called "the black game"? Are they the same thing? You used that expression earlier.'

  'Yes,' he said. 'Well, it doesn't only refer to propaganda, but to all black operations. It may have been Crossman and Delmer who invented the term, I'm not sure. According to them, the Americans—who, in part, copied us when it came to subversion techniques and who have reveled in using them ever since (rather clumsily, it must be said)—never learned to apply them as we did, to play it as a game despite the gravity of the situation. Far worse, they didn't give it up in peacetime. There was a book published about twenty or twenty-five years ago entitled The Black Game. I read it, it's written by someone called Howe.'

  'Was it also known as "the wet game"?' I was almost certain now that 'wet gamblers' had been the term used by Pérez Nuix on the night she visited me unannounced.

  'It's not a term I've heard very often, but possibly, yes. Perhaps because black operations often involved blood being spilled. White operations, on the other hand, rarely did; they were dry. But where were we?' he added, slightly irritated. 'Why am I telling you all this? Oh dear me, I've forgotten again.' The Spanish equivalent of 'Oh dear me' would be 'Ay Dios,' but in English there was no mention of God. Perhaps his memory could no longer stretch as far as it once could, from the beginning of a story to its end. Perhaps that was the one area in which his recent decline had become noticeable. He lost sight of the initial thread, although it took only the slightest of nudges for him to recover it.

  'You were telling me about your wife,' I said to help him out. 'About what she did during the War.'

  'Ah, yes, I was going to tell you how Valerie died, since you ask, and not for the first time either,' he replied. 'But it's important that you understand what the PWE was and how it worked, that you grasp precisely what she was involved in and what she became used to. In a sense, Sefton Delmer was the PWE's equivalent of Bomber Harris, except that he didn't have planes or troops at his command, just experts in deceit and forgery.' And when he saw that the name of Harris rang only a faint bell with me, he added: Arthur Harris, the Air Marshal, was the one who ordered the burning of fifty thousand Hamburg citizens and one hundred and fifty thousand Dresden citizens towards the end of the War on the cynical pretense that he was attacking military targets; he also flattened Cologne, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Mannheim; he was an implacable man with too much power, almost a psychopath really, willing to use any means at his disposal to crush the enemy and win.' Then I remembered him mentioning Harris before: 'A few months ago I read in a book by Knightley,' he had said, 'that the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris, dubbed the members of the SOE amateurish, ignorant, irresponsible and mendacious,' the same men who had been behind the assassination of Heydrich using bullets impregnated with botulin and behind many other acts of sabotage, destruction and terror. 'Harris and Delmer were, according to Crossman, possibly the only ones who were allowed, in their respective fields, to wage total war—the total war that Goring and Goebbels had threatened but never carried out. Indeed, Delmer was allowed to outdo the Nazis themselves (that is, he plumbed still lower depths than they did) in lies and calumnies, in the manipulation and invention of news and information and in deceiving the enemy population. Black propaganda, like strategic bombing, was nihilist in its aims and purely destructive in its effects, as Crossman himself acknowledged. And it turned out to be an enormously effective weapon, which is why everyone uses it now and with no qualms at all. Sefton Delmer was a real genius, as no one would deny. He was born in Berlin of an Australian father.'—'Yet another bogus Englishman,' I thought, 'how many more?'—'He had studied there and later here in Oxford; before the War, as The Daily Express correspondent in Berlin, he had met Ernst Rohm and, through him, Hitler, Goring, Goebbels and Himmler. He had a perfect understanding of the German character and psychology; in fact, his background meant that, when War first broke out, he was initially eyed with great suspicion here and wasn't allowed to occupy any responsible post until the security services had observed him and given him the green light—imagine that. From the people who worked with him he demanded absolute secrecy, discipline and determination, in other words, a complete lack of scruples. He gradually began recruiting Germans to his team: former members of the International Brigades, émigrés, refugees, then a few prisoners of war willing to collaborate, an important deserter who had escaped to London after the failed attempt on Hitler's life in July 1944, and even a former member of the SS. He said the same thing to all of them as soon as they arrived in Woburn, where the department was based: "We are waging against Hitler a kind of total war of wits. Anything goes, so long as it serves to bring nearer the end of the war and the complete defeat of the Reich. If you are at all squeamish about what you may be called upon to do against your own countrymen you must say so now. I'll understand that. However, you will be no good to us in that case, and no doubt some other job will be found for you. But if you feel like joining me, I must warn you that in my unit we are up to all the dirty tricks we can devise. The dirtier the better. No holds barred. Lies, phone-tapping, embezzlement, treachery, forgery, defamation, disinformation, spreading dissension, making false statements and accusations, you name it. Even, don't forget, sheer murder.'"—'Sheer murder' was the expression he used.—'Valerie heard him say this more than once. She became quite close to him.'

  Wheeler paused for thought, perhaps remembering Valerie being close to Sefton Delmer. Now he raised his hand to his lips and gently stroked them. Then he again ran his thumb down the scar on his chin, it was odd that I'd never seen him make that gesture until then. I wondered if he was inviting me to ask him about that too. However, as long as he did not mention it himself, I would abstain.

  'And what were these dirty tricks? What exactly did the black game involve?' I asked.

  'Well, most of their activities we only found out about after the War was over. Needless to say, they forged everything. That was one of the things we really excelled at: radio broadcasts, every kind of document, including orders from Reich bigwigs like General von Falkenhorst who was in command of the troops in Norway; soldier's leave permits, entry passes into vital installations and buildings, circulars, satirical posters, postage stamps, rubber stamps, envelopes and letterheads, even packs of cigarettes, I remember seeing some called Efka—"Pyramiden," and everything had to be able to pass as genuinely German, or at least, when that proved impossible, as having been made in Germany or in Austria, which would create the uneasy sense that we had more infiltrators there than we really did, that we had far more people hidden in their territory, equipped with the infrastructure and the means and a tremendous operating capacity, which not only worried them, it made them waste a lot of time and effort pursuing and hunting down ghosts. We could reach everywhere with the radio, even submarines, whose crews had the demoralizing feeling that they were being watched by us and could not conceal their positions from us. But the most important thing was to stir up enmity among the Germans themselves and to work to their detriment, both at the collective and the individual level, so as to foment distrust among them and make them fear each other. And of course, when feasible, to eliminate or bring about the downfall of high-ranking officials both civil and military. The black section
of the PWE printed wanted posters of SS officers who were accused of being traitors, deserters, impostors or criminals wanted by the authorities: they urged people to shoot these men on sight and offered rewards of ten thousand marks or more, and assured them that even the Iron Crosses the officers might be wearing were mere forgeries. It was all very calculated. Some of those posters, supported by a radio campaign, showed the Reichkommissar Ley, a Nazi Party heavyweight with a somewhat dissolute lifestyle, and accused him of hoarding ration coupons, and Dr. Ley was obliged to deny this indignantly: "I am a perfectly normal consumer!" he roared over the radio.' And Wheeler couldn't help chuckling, remembering something that Valerie herself might have laughingly told him, breaking the Official Secrets Act to which she would have been subject. 'They issued stamps bearing the image not of Hitler, but of that ambitious man Himmler, with the intention of setting them at each other's throats, giving more credence to the persistent rumors that the latter was hoping to replace the former as Führer and thus putting Himmler on the spot. But there were more serious things, too, much wetter things. A common practice of Delmer's was to have fake letters sent to the family members of German soldiers who had died of their wounds in military hospitals in Italy. They would intercept the uncoded cablegrams sent by the directors of those hospitals to the Party authorities in Germany and which contained all the information about the deceased and the address of his next of kin. The letters forged by Delmer's team, written in perfect German and on the hospital's headed paper, were supposedly penned by a distressed comrade or nurse who had remained by the dead man's side until the last, and what they usually said, in horrified tones, was that the soldier had, in fact, been killed by lethal injection on the orders of his superiors, when they were informed that he would no longer be available for active service. The Nazi doctors needed the beds for those soldiers who would soon be able to be sent back to the front, and so they got rid of the badly injured men without compassion or gratitude, cruelly and expeditiously, as if they were so much detritus. Delmer and his unit were perfectly aware that they were the ones who were practising real and extreme cruelty by making a grief-stricken widow or someone's aged parents or orphaned children believe such a falsehood (which was, on the other hand, quite believable). However, if this served to feed discontent and rancor among the population, to lower the morale of the combatants, spread disunity among the troops and encourage desertions, that was what mattered. Don't forget, Jacobo, the Second World War felt like a battle for survival. And it was, it really was. And in wars like that the limits on what one can acceptably do are constantly broadening out, almost without one realizing it. Times of peace judge times of war very harshly, and I'm not sure how far it's possible to make such a judgment. They are mutually exclusive: in time of war, for example, peace is inconceivable—and vice versa, a fact that tends to be overlooked. Nevertheless, there are still things that do seem reprehensible even while they're happening or being perpetrated in the most permissive of times, and you see, all those . . . yes, vile deeds, I suppose . . . were kept hidden at the time as well, when the War was being waged and no one knew how it would end. Sefton Delmer's unit didn't officially exist, and all its members were told to deny its existence (and, therefore, their own existence) both to the world as a whole and to other organizations that were almost (but not quite) as secret, like the SOE, or like us later on, silent and silenced for rather different reasons but mainly to do with secrecy and discretion. And do you know, after the War, not only was the PWE dissolved immediately, its black members were given more or less the following instructions: "For years we have abstained from talking about our work to anyone not in our unit, and therefore little is known about us or our techniques. People may have their suspicions, but they don't know anything for certain. And to keep it that way, we want you to continue as you have up until now. Don't allow anything or anyone to provoke you into boasting about the work we've done, about the tricks and traps we laid for the enemy. If we start to show off to people about the ingenious things we got up to, who knows where it will end. So, mum's the word.'" And I remembered having seen that last expression on one of the 'careless talk' posters. '"Propaganda should, by its nature, be a subject one doesn't talk about." This was doubtless out of prudence,' Wheeler went on, 'but also, I think, because the work was such that they couldn't feel entirely proud of it, and less so in the final stages of the War than at any other time. Valerie, a fe mía, certainly wasn't proud of it.' And he used that rather literary Spanish of his, a fe mía, the equivalent of the English 'forsooth.' 'When the German civilians were at their most desperate and confused, our phony radio stations heaped still more confusion and desperation on them. We warned, for example, that an enormous number of counterfeit German marks were circulating in the country, which meant that people could trust neither their own money nor what other people gave them. The worst, however, came after the brutal bombings by Harris and the Americans, and again when troops were already invading Germany, ours from the west and the Russians from the east. During air raids, the German stations stopped transmitting so as not to serve as beacons for the RAF and USAF planes. But in a matter of seconds, don't ask me how, Delmer and his colleagues managed to take over their frequencies, pretending, in their immaculate German, that normal transmissions had been resumed, and sending out bewildering, disorienting, counterproductive or contradictory messages that wreaked the maximum amount of havoc and spread chaos. Initially, survivors in the devastated cities (Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Dresden, Leipzig and so many others) were advised not to move, not to leave their respective cities and to wait for help to arrive. Delmer, apparently at Churchill's behest, ordered them to do exactly the opposite, via a communiqué that he passed off, of course, as an official statement from the Reich. His team informed the people that seven bomb-free zones had been set up in the center and south of Germany, to which refugees could go and where they would be safe from aerial attacks by the enemy. They were assured that neutral representatives of the Red Cross in Berlin had told the authorities of the Reich that Eisenhower himself was going to declare those seven areas to be safe, and that the banks were moving their securities there. This information was, of course, entirely false, but it had a tremendous effect. The roads were inundated with whole families fleeing towards those imaginary zones, with their ragged children, their wounded and their few household goods piled into carts, in dilapidated buses that ran out of gas, even in hearses, in whatever they could find to carry them away from their infernos. It was total chaos. Many roads were blocked by such large numbers of people that it hampered the defensive work of the German army, who didn't know how to avoid these hordes, nor where to put them or how to get them out of the way, or what to do with them. And it's likely that still more bombs fell on many of those terrified displaced persons who set off en masse in search of those phantom safe zones, and who would perhaps have survived among the ruins of their cities, if they'd sat tight, because there were no safe zones anywhere in Germany, or only in those places that had already been destroyed.'