The Deceivers

Allied Military Deception in the Second World War

Thaddeus Holt

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781439103883
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In World War II, the Allies employed unprecedented methods and practiced the most successful military deception ever seen, meticulously feeding misinformation to Axis intelligence to lead Axis commanders into erroneous action. Thaddeus Holt's elegantly written and comprehensive book is the first to tell the full story behind these operations. Exactly how the Allies engaged in strategic deception has remained secret for decades. Now, with the help of newly declassified material, Holt reveals this secret to the world in a riveting work of historical scholarship.Once the Americans joined the war in 1941, they had much to learn from their British counterparts, who had been honing their deception skills for years. As the war progressed, the British took charge of misinformation efforts in the European theater, while the Americans focused on the Pacific. The Deceivers takes readers from the early British achievements in the Middle East and Europe at the beginning of the war to the massive Allied success of D-Day, American victory in the Pacific theater, and the war's culmination on the brink of an invasion of Japan.Colonel John Bevan, who managed British deception operations from London, described the three essentials to strategic deception as good plans, double agents, and codebreaking, and The Deceivers covers each of these aspects in minute detail. Holt brings to life the little-known men, British and American, who ran Allied deception, such as Bevan, Dudley Clarke, Peter Fleming, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Newman Smith. He tracks the development of deception techniques and tells the hitherto unknown story of double agent management and other deception through the American FBI and Joint Security Control.Full of fascinating sources and astounding revelations, The Deceivers is an indispensable volume and an unparalleled contribution to World War II literature.

CHAPTER 1
The Master of the Game

Lieutenant-Colonel Dudley Wrangel Clarke was forty-one that late 1940, having been born in Johannesburg on April 27, 1899. He was the eldest child of a venturesome Yorkshireman named Ernest Clarke, who in his late twenties grew bored after nine years in the family shipping business at Hull and went out to South Africa. There he knocked about a bit and at the end of 1895 found himself carrying dispatches in the abortive plot to take over the Transvaal for the British Empire known as the “Jameson Raid.” He did not go to jail for his part in the Raid, but some friends were not so lucky. Visiting one of these, Clarke met his friend’s cellmate, who was the head of a gold mining company, and he offered Clarke a job. Clarke took it, and did well with the company. He married Madeline Gardiner, a bank manager’s daughter who had been brought out to South Africa in her infancy. Her father was Irish and her mother Austrian. Ernest and Madeline had two children born in South Africa, Dudley and Dorothy, known as Dollie.

After the Boer War the company sent Ernest to its London office. He bought a house at Watford, in the northwestern exurbs of London (largely, he claimed, from his winnings in the ship’s pool on the daily run, having bought up all the low numbers on a day when he had ascertained that the ship had stopped in the night). After several years two more children were born to the Clarkes: Tom, known outside the family as Tibby, and Sybil. Clarke continued to prosper with his company, and thereafter on his own as an investment advisor. In 1910 he retired first to Frinton-on-Sea, and subsequently to Oxted in Surrey. Soon after the outbreak of the First World War he was largely responsible for founding, and financing, the Motor Ambulance Brigade. For this he was knighted and became Sir Ernest.

The children seem all to have inherited English ingenuity, Irish charm, and Austrian Gemütlichkeit, plus a generous share of brains. There appear to have been some genes on the Clarke side in particular that Dudley shared with their Uncle Sidney, Sir Ernest’s eldest brother; besides being a barrister who wrote a legal advice column for the News of the World, and the sometime author of Old Moore’s Almanack, Uncle Sidney was for years chairman of the Magic Circle, the magicians’ society of England, and could always be relied upon to find a half-crown in a nephew’s ear, or, as happened once to Tom, a ten-shilling note in his boiled egg. The boys were sent to Charterhouse, one of the major English public schools, and Tom went on to Cambridge. Dudley and Dollie never married; the other two did. Dudley went into the army and Dollie became a journalist and author. Tom became an author, editor, and screenwriter; he wrote the scripts for the classic Ealing Studios comedies The Titfield Thunderbolt, The Lavender Hill Mob, and Passport to Pimlico, among other films. Sybil married a Canadian and moved to Toronto.

In May of 1916, just turned seventeen, Dudley Clarke entered the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, where engineer and artillery officers were trained. Commissioned in November in the Royal Artillery, he tried to get sent to France; but in the land forces you had to be nineteen to serve overseas. So he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and was a pilot in Egypt for the rest of the war. In 1919 he returned to the artillery, but he proudly wore his RFC wings for the rest of his army career (fighting a running battle for a number of years with War Office bureaucrats who said that it was improper to do so).

He was next posted to Mesopotamia for three years. Then in 1922 he took a long leave to travel in Europe, with a detour to carry out a minor special mission for the British commander in Constantinople during the troubles when Mustafa Kemal drove out the Greeks and ousted the Sultan. In 1924, again on leave from the army, he covered the Riff rebellion in Morocco for the London Morning Post. From 1926, he spent four years in Sussex attached to the Territorial Army (the British equivalent of the National Guard in the United States), and in 1930 volunteered for the Transjordan Frontier Force in present-day Jordan. In 1933-34 he attended the Staff College at Camberley. There he came under the favorable notice of the commandant, General Sir John Dill. As part of the course he visited Italy and Germany and got to know a number of German officers. He was in Nuremberg at the time of the great Party Rally of 1934 memorialized in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, and was in the Saarland in 1935 when the plebiscite returning it to Germany was held.

After Camberley he served in coastal defense at Aden, and in 1936 was transferred to Palestine. There he was for practical purposes the chief of the operations staff for General Dill, now the commander in Palestine, and for Dill’s successor Wavell. There, too, from a period of time when he was on an Arab death squad’s hit list, he picked up the habit of never accepting a table in a restaurant that was not against a wall.

From Palestine, now a major, he was assigned to the War Office in London. At Eastertide 1939, he paid a visit to his old friend Kenneth Strong, the assistant military attaché in Berlin (who was later to be Eisenhower’s chief of intelligence), and when there he made the acquaintance of several German intelligence officers, of whom, he wrote after the war, “two at least were to cross my path again before very long—on the other side of the fence.” When war broke out at the beginning of September he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel.

In the first year of the war he performed a succession of interesting tasks. He was sent to Africa to reconnoiter an overland route from Mombasa, the port of Kenya, to Egypt, by which the Middle East could be supplied if Italy should enter the war and succeed in closing both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. (This meant working with Wavell once more. “Would you like to come back to my staff again?” asked Wavell as Clarke departed. “I knew it was as good as fixed,” wrote Clarke later.) He went twice to Norway during that ill-fated campaign in the spring of 1940. He worked on an abortive effort to hold Calais during the collapse on the Western Front in May. He was sent on a secret mission to Eire, involving contingency planning in case the Germans should make a sudden descent on that country.

When later in that May Sir John Dill became Chief of the Imperial General Staff, he made Clarke one of his military assistants. Clarke was at Dill’s side during the Dunkirk evacuation; thereafter he was deeply involved in the original formation and organization of the Commandos. (He took credit for giving the Commandos their name, after the legendary fast, hard-hitting Boer units of his South African childhood.) Among those he worked with was the actor David Niven, who had left Hollywood and rejoined the Army when war broke out. Clarke had known Niven as a young regular officer before he turned to acting; his brother Henri, known as “Max,” would be one of Clarke’s officers before the war was out. Clarke went personally on the first Commando raid, on the French coast barely three weeks after Dunkirk, and had an ear shot nearly off. For the next five months, during the memorably beautiful summer of the Battle of Britain and on into the autumn of the Blitz, he was immersed in Commando affairs.

Then in November came the summons from Wavell. It had indeed been “as good as fixed.”

Nobody who knew Dudley Clarke ever forgot him. He was fair-haired and blue-eyed, with a twinkling countenance, all rounded with no planes or corners—“a face like a sort of merry-eyed potato,” recalled Sir Edgar Williams, Montgomery’s chief of intelligence—which reminded his secretary of a guinea pig; “a sharp little man with bright, quick eyes,” said Malcolm Muggeridge. Everyone remembered the merry eyes, which he had a habit of blinking incessantly. He was a small and compact man with a “gently booming” voice, always very neat, hair always smoothed back, almost always with a pipe or a long cigarette holder. “A man of few words, as soon as he looked at you and spoke laconically, but very courteously, one became conscious of a sphinxlike quality of sardonic humor and absorbent watchfulness,” who could “seem like someone’s not at all dear old butler … confronted with a nervous and uncertain guest,” wrote David Mure, one of his officers and one of his greatest admirers; “beneath his bland rather old world exterior it was impossible to guess what he was thinking, and what he said nearly always came as a surprise.” The Countess of Ranfurly, General “Jumbo” Wilson’s secretary, remembered him as “brilliantly clever and imaginative and always on the edge of laughter,” and Dennis Wheatley remembered his “quiet chuckle which used to make his shoulders shake slightly.” “An excellent raconteur and great company in a party,” said Wheatley, no mean judge of such matters, “but with a strange quietness about his movements and an uncanny habit of suddenly appearing in a room without anyone having noticed him enter it”; “a truly legendary figure” who “got a great deal of fun out of intrigue of every kind.” Wheatley observed that Clarke even affixed his insignia of rank to his uniform with snaps so they could be quickly removed to transform him into an inconspicuous junior officer.

Clarke enjoyed tilting at bureaucratic windmills. He had been born during the siege of Ladysmith by the Boers, and he engaged for years in a cheerful struggle with the War Office, claiming to be entitled to the Boer War campaign medal even though he had been a newborn infant at the time—because, he said, he had been fed on garrison rations, and an order had decreed that all persons on the ration strength of the garrison were entitled to the medal. But, unlike such other military gadflies as his colleague Orde Wingate, Clarke never went out of his way “to flout, disagree or to insult Authority; he merely smiled sweetly, got his own way, or went in another direction.”

Among his many talents, Clarke was a proficient horseman who at the Empire Exhibition Rodeo at Wembley in 1924 was the only non-cowboy to last for thirty seconds on a bucking bronco. And he was a dedicated moviegoer; some of his best ideas came to him by inspiration as he sat alone in a darkened cinema watching the images flicker across the screen.

“He did not suffer fools gladly,” said his old friend and deputy Noel Wild, “but he was always scrupulously fair. If you made a mistake you were either fired or forgiven and there it ended. He could be difficult but always good tempered, and never moody. He enjoyed an argument. It was always tempered by wit and good humor, and if ever it looked likely to become heated, he would quickly wind it up with some outrageously unexpected remark, and that was the end.”

Clarke was a lifelong bachelor. He detested children (or affected to do so, in a W. C. Fields sort of way). He was a thoughtful friend and liked giving imaginative little gifts; he had a feminine sensibility, you might say, though there was nothing effeminate about him. He had been unlucky in love, with at least two experiences that might well leave any man wary. In Wiesbaden in 1922 during his tour of Europe he had fallen under the spell of an attractive Russian named Nina, daughter of a court official of the Tsar who had been killed in the revolution. “She had a distinctive Slav beauty, with fine, high cheekbones and sparkling dark eyes,” remembered Clarke many years later, “but she also had a very un-Slav-like sense of fun. I fell for her rather heavily—so heavily that it led me into undertaking the most foolish mission of my life.” That mission was to take an envelope containing a letter and some money to a Russian friend of Nina’s in Bulgaria in violation of currency regulations. He did so at the cost of some hair-raising scrapes and much of his own money, but he never saw Nina again; evidently all he had done was to enable her Russian sweetheart to join her. Then during his years in Sussex with the Territorials in the late 1920s he had had what he called “a romance which had meant everything in the world to me”; but the lady turned down his proposal, and married an officer in the Guards. (“She made the most wonderful treacle tarts,” he said wistfully once in Cairo.) He seems not to have been willing to risk another such disappointment; nevertheless, all his life he greatly enjoyed the company of beautiful and elegant women and made every effort to have them around. “Dudley’s Duchesses,” his friends called them.

Indeed, he liked the good life in general: good food, good wine, select company, living in the right place, moving in the right circles. It was characteristic that when posted to the War Office in 1939 he found himself a cozy little flat on the top floor of a centuries-old house in Mayfair. It was characteristic that he made so many friends in the 11th Hussars—“Prince Albert’s Own,” one of the snootiest regiments of the army—that he, a mere artilleryman, was asked to write the history of the 11th’s service in the Second World War. It was characteristic that in Cairo he took up residence at Shepheard’s Hotel. He was, it must be confessed, a bit class-conscious and a bit of a lion-hunter, and as the war progressed he would attract to his “A” Force sprigs of the Establishment and people of conspicuous accomplishments, and less exalted members of the staff sometimes felt themselves somewhat on the outside looking in.

But these were venial faults by comparison with the phenomenal talent that he brought to his work. “He had such a fantastically quick brain although it was not quite like anybody else’s,” recalled Oliver Thynne, one of his officers; “the most all-containing brain of anyone I ever met.” “At any time, as well as complete deception orders of battle and battle plans for say two particular situations … which were worked out in all detail on paper, there would be another six embryo plans in his mind which could be translated to paper in 24 hours. I have never known a brain so full of stuff! And he never forgot anything in transmitting it to paper, either!” “He was certainly the most unusual Intelligence officer of his time, very likely of all time,” wrote Mure; “his mind worked differently from anyone else’s and far quicker; he looked out on the world through the eyes of his opponents.”

The London Blitz was building to its climax that 5th of December 1940 when Dudley Clarke took his leave of his Mayfair flat; a permanent leave, as things turned out, for the house would collapse in the last big raid on London five months later. To get from England to Egypt in those days took a week of flying time, to avoid Vichy French territory. Clarke flew therefore by way of neutral Portugal, the Canary Islands, and Bathurst in Gambia, to Freetown in Sierra Leone; and from there to Lagos in Nigeria—apparently in the guise of an American war correspondent—where he met with Free French officers from Chad to discuss the possibility of long-range operations across the Sahara against the Italians in Libya (“a tang of ‘Beau Geste,’” said Clarke of these talks).

From Lagos to Kano in Nigeria; thence on past the Free French outpost at Fort Lamy and to El Fasher (“an evening flight low down, with ostrich galloping below in the sunset”), on to Khartoum and down the Nile Valley to Wadi Halfa. The next day to Luxor, and finally to Cairo on the afternoon of December 18, where he was met by an old friend from the Palestine days, Lieutenant-Colonel Tony Simonds, who was startled to see Clarke step off the plane in his “American war correspondent” costume—a loud pair of black-and-white plus-fours. He was to report to Wavell the next morning.

General Sir Archibald Wavell was a remarkable man. “Behind an inarticulate and ruggedly orthodox exterior,” Sir Michael Howard has written, “Wavell concealed one of the most fertile minds ever possessed by a British officer.” The inarticulateness was legendary, a reserve that discomfited many, with long periods of silence that baffled many more.

He could recite poetry by the hour; he was a Latin scholar; he was a clear thinker and a deep one, and a highly creative and imaginative strategist; he had a knack for spotting men of special, out-of-the ordinary talents. Wavell and Churchill never got on—which might be thought curious, since they were alike in many ways, but to one of Churchill’s flamboyant, outgoing, and articulate temperament, the reserve and silences were frustrating and ultimately exasperating. That was a pity, for it led Churchill eventually to do Wavell great injustice.

From his Cairo headquarters Wavell presided over a vast and complex theater. To the north the British mandates of Palestine and Transjordan abutted the French mandate of Syria (including Lebanon), while British-ruled Cyprus lay off the Syrian-Turkish coast. Farther east lay Iraq, likewise a British mandate until 1932 and then at least nominally an independent kingdom. East of Iraq lay the independent kingdom of Iran (then often still called Persia), abutting to the east upon British India; the latter was a wholly separate theater. North of Syria and Iraq lay neutral Turkey. North of Iran and Turkey lay the Soviet Union. Iran was important not only because of its oil—for a generation the main source of fuel for the Royal Navy—but as a back-door supply route for the Soviet Union. To the south, Saudi Arabia and the scattered sheikdoms were drowsy backwaters in those pre-oil days.

South of Egypt lay the vast Sudan, nominally an Anglo-Egyptian condominium but under British control for all practical purposes. South of the Sudan was Italian East Africa, composed of the long-established Italian colonies of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, plus Ethiopia, which Mussolini had conquered in 1936; the Duke of Aosta was the Italian commander-in-chief in that region. On the north side of the outlet from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean lay British-ruled Aden. On its south side was the little province of French Somaliland, Vichy-controlled and closely blockaded; along the coast to the east lay British Somaliland, which to Churchill’s annoyance had been occupied by the Duke of Aosta. South of Italian East Africa were the British territories of Kenya and Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania).

Most important of all, west of Egypt was Libya, ruled by Italy since just before the First World War, and hence the logical Axis base for a drive against Suez.

Axis intrigue was alive in the northern tier of neutrals. Turkey was a hotbed of espionage. Syria and Lebanon were in Vichy French hands, and there was a disturbing amount of German interest in them as possible bases for air attacks on the Middle East. The King of Iraq and the Shah of Iran owed their thrones to Britain, but there were influential pro-Axis elements in both countries.

For the British, the focus of this huge theater was the Suez Canal, the most vulnerable link in the British “lifeline” from England past British-held Gibraltar and Malta, through the Canal, down the Red Sea, past Aden and out into the Indian Ocean and on to British India, Burma, Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong. So Cairo, capital and metropolis of Egypt, only some eighty miles from the canal as the crow flies, was the logical place for the headquarters and nerve center of the theater.

* * *

Though it was a seat of war and the headquarters and base of the British effort in the Middle East, Egypt was not part of the British Empire but a nominally independent monarchy under the young King Farouk. By treaty, the Bri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: The Master of the Game
• Chapter 2: The Art of Deception
• Chapter 3: The Customers
• Chapter 4: Most Secret Sources and Special Means
• Chapter 5: London Control
• Chapter 6: The Turning of the Tide
• Chapter 7: Enter the Yanks
• Chapter 8: Hustling the East (I)
• Chapter 9: The Soft Underbelly
• Chapter 10: Hustling the East (II)
• Chapter 11: American Deception Grows Up
• Chapter 12: Bodyguard
• Chapter 13: Quicksilver
• Chapter 14: Mediterranean Finale
• Chapter 15: Last Act in Europe
• Chapter 16: Hustling the East (III)
• Chapter 17: Bluebird
• Chapter 18: Last Round in Asia
• Epilogue
• Appendix I: Allied Deception Operations
• Appendix II: Special Means Channels
• Appendix III: The Phantom Armies
• Appendix IV: Maps
• Bibliography
• References
• Index