Churchill's Wizards (45 page)

Peter Fleming assembled the contents of the briefcase with care. He persuaded Wavell to part with some genuine personal letters as well as a favourite photograph of his daughter Pamela. Among the papers were Wavell's ‘Notes to Alexander', which alluded to ‘two armies' in Burma, growing air strength and a new secret weapon. Altogether the documents made the Allies seem far stronger in India than the Japanese had estimated. Fleming also forged an apparently indiscreet letter by Joan Bright Astley, who was running General Ismay's ‘Secret Intelligence Centre' for commanders-in-chief in Winston Churchill's Defence Office in London, and he borrowed one of Wavell's impressivelyribboned coats.

Fleming flew to Burma early on 29 April 1942, accompanied by Wavell's ADC, Captain Sandy Reid-Scott. As a Second Lieutenant in the 11th Hussars, Reid-Scott had won the MC in December 1940 and then lost an eye in an air attack on the Bardia to Tobruk road. At Shwebo, on the plain in central Burma between the Chindwin and the Irrawaddy rivers, Fleming and Reid-Scott conferred with General Harold Alexander. His chief of staff suggested that a good place for the ruse was about sixty miles south: the Ava bridge across the Irrawaddy river at Sagaing, just downstream from Mandalay, where the last of the Burma Corps would be retreating north. With his usual unerring luck, Fleming now ran into Mike Calvert who had helped him with Auxiliary Units in Kent in 1940, and was here commanding a battalion. They obtained an almost brand-new, green, Ford Mercury V8 staff car and drove it south to the Ava bridge and 17th Divisional
HQ at Sagaing. Panicking Indian refugees and retreating Chinese soldiers were coming the other way, and seemed ‘a ragged and sorry sight' to Reid-Scott.

Major General Bill Slim, the Burma Corps Commander (and future Field Marshal) was marshalling the retreat, trying to see that the Chinese Fifth Army and 7th Armoured Brigade got north across the Irrawaddy before the iron road-and-rail bridge was blown up by midnight. Around 7.30pm, on a curve 400 yards south of the bridgehead, Fleming and Calvert made some skidmarks and then ran their empty sedan staff car off the road. ‘The results were not spectacular', Fleming wrote. ‘The car flounced down the embankment without overturning, crossed a cart track, and plunged into a small
nullah
, at the bottom of which it came to rest with its engine still ticking over self-righteously.' They let the air out of one tyre, punctured the other, banged the bodywork about a bit, threw stones to break the windscreen and headlights and took the ignition keys. In the boot of the car they left the briefcase together with Wavell's service dress jacket with its ribbons and commander-in-chief's medal on the breast, two blankets and three novels nicked from the Shwebo Club library. The vehicle was in good condition, visible from the road, and likely to attract enemy attention. By eight o'clock the conspirators were back north of the bridge in the jeep.

Slim saw the last Stuart tanks in the retreat – each one weighing 13 tons – singly and gingerly crossing the Irrawaddy on a roadway that was meant to have a capacity of only 6 tons, and applauded the British engineering of the Ava bridge in its last hours. ‘With a resounding thump it was blown at 2359 hours on 30th April, and its centre spans fell neatly into the river–asad sight, and a signal that we had lost Burma,' wrote Slim at the end of the chapter ‘Disaster' in
Defeat into
Victory
.

As with many deceptions, it is not known exactly what
ERROR
achieved. The Japanese never invaded India. But Peter Fleming came to think that the Intelligence branch of the Japanese Imperial Army was not worthy of the name. Stolidly dim, they could not be relied upon to make the right deductions from obvious facts, and they were either ignored or despised by people in Japanese Operations. Fleming surmised that the briefcase plant was probably far too subtle a diversion. ‘What we want', he cabled London Controlling Section, ‘is
not red herrings, but purple whales.' purple whales in time became the code-name of a double agent among Chiang Kai-Shek's Chinese in Chungking, used to pass (or even better,
sell
) false high-level documents, all imaginatively concocted by Peter Fleming, to the Japanese.

When ‘Johnny' Bevan took charge in June 1942, he wrote his own energising directive for ‘London Controlling Section' (LCS). Reporting directly to the chiefs of staff, the LCS was to prepare and coordinate strategic deception and cover plans, support their execution, and do all and anything ‘calculated to mystify or mislead the enemy whenever military advantage may be so gained'.

Bevan was an Old Etonian stockbroker with good social connections who had impressed Churchill in the First World War. Both Bevan and Wheatley were gregarious and clubbable, which was important when they needed to make important friends and pull strings.
Bon
viveur
Wheatley kept his cellar well stocked through his old mates in the wine trade, and was a great believer in lunch, as well as a good dinner. Getting tight was part of the job; sociability lubricated vital contacts. A typical wartime lunch at Rules started with two or three Pimms at the bar followed by a snorter of absinthe (known as ‘Chanel No. 5'), red or white wine with the smoked salmon or potted shrimps, Dover sole, jugged hare, salmon or game, and then port or Kümmel with a Welsh rarebit. Little wonder Wheatley took secret afternoon naps in bedrooms reserved for cabinet ministers. Bevan was much fussier, more nervous, and driven, so the two men complemented each other well.

Others who came to join LCS included Major Ronald Wingate, son of Sir Reginald Wingate, Sirdar of the Sudan in T. E. Lawrence's day. Wingate was a former civil servant who relished the Byzantine hierarchies of British bureaucracy. Because he understood perfectly what he called ‘the working of the protocol' he achieved results that no outsider could ever hope to match. Whereas Bevan could get irritable and rude, Wingate was always imperturbable and urbane. Wheatley considered him ‘as cunning as seven serpents'.

It was Bevan who moved the LCS down into the fortified underground basement of the No. 10 Downing Street Annexe. Upstairs they had been physically isolated, but now they were right in the thick of
things. Wheatley compared the Cabinet War Rooms to the lower deck of a battleship. Steel support girders held up five-foot-thick concrete bombproofing, and pipes and cables ran overhead through the whitewashed narrow passages of a warren of over a hundred rooms, with chemical lavatories and stale air, guarded by armed Royal Marines. This was where strategic decisions were taken and where planning happened. Bringing deception right into the heart of war operations worked well: only in the place where the most truths were known could the best lies be formulated. The Prime Minister took a keen interest in LCS's work. Sefton Delmer, the psychological warrior of black propaganda, would also become a frequent visitor. From the summer of 1942 until victory the whole machinery of British deception began to synchronise and work together to keep the Axis guessing about where and when the next blow would fall.

When Dudley Clarke left London for Portugal on 12 October 1941, after his meeting with the chiefs of staff, he had every reason to feel both proud and successful; he had been listened to with great respect; he had been offered the top job, and turned it down. Now he was going to Lisbon to continue misinforming the Abwehr that Auchinleck would not be ready to attack in North Africa until after Christmas 1941. Clarke was preparing the ground for the story that agent
CHEESE
would be sending over the radio in late October: to wit, the fiction that Auchinleck's
CRUSADER
offensive was off because three British divisions – one armoured, two infantry – had to go to the Caucasus to help the Russians, who were now battling the huge German invasion. Wavell was said to be leaving India to lead the three divisions. The whole thing seemed to make sense. The British had quashed the revolt in Iraq, dealt with Syria and then, at the end of August, moved into Persia, thus securing the Iranian oilfields. Logically, their next primary military focus might well have been to focus on the Caucasus. Clarke's job was to persuade the Axis that the Allies were about to do just that, rather than poised to make a move in North Africa.

But when the head of ‘A' Force went to Madrid, presumably to spread the same plausible rumours through Spanish channels, he came a mighty cropper. The secretive activities that had always worked for him now came unstuck in a most ridiculous manner, and Clarke almost lost everything. The incident remains to a degree mysterious
even today, partly because it could only be referred to at the time in an oblique manner, but the bones of what happened are clear.

Some time in the middle of October 1941, Dudley Clarke was arrested in Madrid dressed in women's clothes, and detained by the Spanish police. Where exactly, and in what circumstances, is still not known. But the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge holds copies of the four photographs taken of Clarke, which are not at all the usual police mugshots. There are two seated poses, and two full-length where Clarke stands by a table-chair in front of a sheet pinned on the wall of a room with a bare wooden floor. The photos show two different incarnations of the head of ‘A' Force, Middle East. One is a perfectly conventional fair-haired, middle-aged man in a pinstriped suit, a slightly floppy-collared shirt and a checked bow tie, frowning slightly. The other shows a lipsticked, kohl-eyed ‘woman', her expression hard to read but possibly a touch defiant and even amused, wearing an elegant, slim-fitting day dress printed with passion flowers and three strands of pearls, perfectly accessorised by dark stockings and high-heeled court shoes, a chic small white handbag and a pale close-fitting turban, the only incongruous note overlarge hands, which are only half-concealed by dark elbow-length ruched satin gloves.

Guy Liddell of MI5, the Director of Counter Espionage who had last met Clarke riding high in London the month before, rather acidly recorded Clarke's ‘difficulties' in his diary for 21 October:

How did Clarke get out of police custody? According to Liddell, a man Clarke had contacted earlier in Lisbon, and whom he believed to be a German agent, was in Madrid at the time and saved Clarke's bacon by telling the Spanish authorities that Clarke was ‘an important agent who was ready to assist the Germans'. Liddell thought that Clarke's ‘speedy release' could only be explained ‘by the Germans having intervened on his behalf'.

Once again a supercilious note creeps in. Liddell comments: ‘It may be that [Clarke] is just the type who imagines himself as the super secret service agent.'

Perhaps Clarke's sudden pre-eminence in the London meetings of early October had grated on MI5's Director of Counter Espionage, but Clarke had also crossed a line. The man who was in charge of ‘A' Force, who knew many British and Allied secrets (including
ULTRA
) and who had recently been offered the post of Controlling Officer for deception worldwide in the War Cabinet Office, had let himself be caught in suspicious circumstances in the field dressed up as a woman, like the most amateurish agent. It is easy to speculate on the attractions of such risky behaviour from Clarke's point of view, though he never publicly commented on the incident. We also have to remember the extraordinarily loud black and white plus-fours and checked cap that Clarke had worn when impersonating a journalist on his first arrival in Egypt. His love of theatre since boyhood, his past as a theatrical entrepreneur, performer and stager of pantomimes, could explain his wanting sometimes to dress up and play a part rather than just writing the scripts. This is certainly how Thaddeus Holt sees it, as a kind of comic caper: ‘no more to it than
Charley's
Aunt
, or d'Artagnan's escape from Milady'.

Was there a sexual element in the charade? Clarke never married, but there is no evidence of homosexuality. As early as 1917, as we have seen, when Dudley was still a teenager, he confessed to overwhelming excitement at the vision of women in uniform on motorbikes. The curious detective thriller that Clarke wrote after the war,
Golden Arrow
(Hodder & Stoughton, 1955), shows persistent and unusually passionate attention to feminine clothing, which the author describes with almost poetic relish and the same obsessive attention to detail that made him a great deception planner. The hero of the novel, Giles Wreford, is a retired colonel rather like Clarke who ran an ‘anti-sabotage' unit in the war and now does freelance security work. (‘Few ever guessed at the capacity for taking infinite pains which lay well-hidden behind an easy-going exterior.') Giles loves
women, but they frequently annoy him by getting something slightly wrong: