The illusionist, p.1
The Illusionist, page 1
For my father, with love
Maps and Illustrations
Maps
pp. xii–xiii Dudley Clarke’s Theatre of War
pp. xiv–xvi The Western Desert
pp. 222–3 El Alamein Line from the German Point of View
pp. 236–7 El Alamein Line in Reality
Illustrations in the Plates
1. Dudley Clarke, drawn in 1945 by Patrick Edward Phillips (Alamy)
2. Clarke as a boy (Family collection)
3. Clarke as a soldier (Family collection)
4. Clarke as a spy (IWM © The Rights Holder [Documents.8080])
5. Claude Auchinleck and Archibald Wavell (Alamy)
6. Troopers Smith and Gurmin (National Archives, Kew)
7. A fake Ethiopian paratrooper (National Archives, Kew)
8. Erwin Rommel (Alamy)
9. Bernard Montgomery (Alamy)
10. Clifford James (Alamy)
11. Clarke dressed as a woman (National Archives, Kew)
12. Clarke back in his suit (National Archives, Kew)
13. Clarke as Volga Olga in the Staff College panto (IWM © The Rights Holder [Documents.8080])
14. Dummy tank units (Alamy)
15. Dummy gun emplacement (Alamy)
16. Ewen Montagu (Getty)
17. Johnny Bevan
18. David Strangeways
19. Jasper Maskelyne (Alamy)
20. A tank with a half-assembled sunshield (National Archives, Kew)
21. Closing a sunshield around a tank (National Archives, Kew)
22. A closed sunshield disguising a tank as a truck (Alamy)
Prologue
Cairo, 1 July 1942
The smell of burning paper was everywhere. Smoke hung in low clouds over the Nile, drifting there from the chic quarter of the city where the British government and military had made their home. In the grounds of the embassy and General Headquarters, diplomats and soldiers shovelled files onto bonfires, while gardeners poked the pyres with rakes to feed the flames. Now and then a document would get caught in a draught and fly up, intact, with the smoke, out over the walls and into the streets beyond, still clearly displaying whatever secrets its owners had hoped to destroy.
From the buildings moved a steady stream of men and women carrying trays and bags of papers to be burned, the smoke stinging their eyes and getting into their hair and clothes, which already stank of sweat from the heat of an Egyptian afternoon in high summer. They made the occasional joke, affecting unconcern, but there was no disguising the seriousness of their purpose, for there was much to do and no one knew how much time they had to do it.
In the streets beyond, there were queues outside banks and crowds inside, as people fought to get their money out. It was the same at the railway station, where they were trying to get themselves or their families out. Some wanted to get their affairs in order first, hoping to sell their businesses or their homes for whatever cash they could raise. Others, including those who had arrived recently in the city as refugees, knew that the most important thing about escaping an advancing army is to flee while you can. People piled into cars, tying mattresses onto the roofs in the desperate hope they would provide some protection from falling debris.
This was panic. Rommel was coming.
For two years the Allied and Axis armies had been chasing each other back and forth across the deserts of North Africa. At times, each side had seemed on the point of victory, only to have it snatched away. Now, though, the result seemed certain. The maverick German commander had swept past the forces that were supposed to stop him, seized the port of Tobruk and rolled over the Egyptian border.
By now, Rommel had become an almost mythic figure to the troops of both sides: fearless, a master tactician, unstoppable, unbeatable, everywhere at once and apparently better informed about his opponents than their own commanders. The Allies had no one to match him, and they knew it.
And he was only hours away. Between him and the city exhausted soldiers gathered from across the British Empire were dug into the sand, preparing to make a final desperate stand in the desert, far from their homes. But what chance did they have of holding him back when their better-prepared and better-equipped comrades had already failed?
Back in Cairo, in a courtyard behind a block of flats a little way away from the embassy, a small team of men and women were holding their own bonfire of paperwork. Overseeing them, telling them which files to keep and which to burn, was a small man in his early forties with a smooth oval face, a high forehead, and a pipe clamped between his teeth.
While others were falling apart, this chap – the shoulders on his uniform revealed him to be a colonel – was calm. They were preparing to flee, but he was getting ready to stay. Destruction of records was only one of the things on his mind. In his office inside, there were maps spread on his desk, and as a motley collection of figures made their way in and out, he took reports, gave orders and made offers. He was blinking incessantly, but not from the smoke or nerves, that was just his way. He was currently conducting simultaneous negotiations with both the police and the local crime syndicates. He had people out in the city organising disguises and hideouts. If the Germans were going to occupy Egypt, he was going to make their lives hell.
There are people who only become their full selves in war, when the normal rules of civilised life are suspended. Some simply relish the chance to kill. But for others war offers the opportunity to become a sort of respectable scoundrel, doing things no gentleman would usually consider, but with official approval. A pirate, if you like, in the service of your country. Dudley Clarke was one of those men.
All around him was chaos, and he was having the time of his life.
* * *
If you had asked a British officer in Cairo in 1942 to point Colonel Clarke out to you in the bar of Shepheard’s, the hotel that was one of the hubs of life for Cairo’s military smart set, they would have been able to. He was a well-known figure in the city’s wartime society, always ready with a cocktail and a story. But if you’d asked what it was that he did, you would have had less success. Those who knew didn’t tell, and almost no one really did know. It was something hush-hush, working for the commander-in-chief.
The mystery persisted for the rest of his life. When Clarke died in 1974, The Times carried a two-paragraph obituary, describing him as ‘a soldier of originality and independence’, but not explaining how these qualities had manifested themselves, or what part he had played in the world war in which he rose to the rank of brigadier.
Neither does Clarke appear much in histories of the war, even those dealing with campaigns and operations with which he was intimately involved. When he does, it is generally a passing reference. He sometimes pops up in memoirs, in the background in some scene of great moment, but even then the authors often seem faintly baffled about his presence.
He enjoyed a brief moment of celebrity in 2013, when files were released dealing with his 1941 arrest in Madrid – an episode that might have cost him his career – but those reports too were vague about what his job had actually been. He had another sudden moment of prominence at the end of 2022, when he was portrayed by Dominic West as a louche spy in a Chanel dress in the BBC drama SAS: Rogue Heroes. Though the series is based in fact, it largely fictionalised Clarke. That’s fair enough: he was a man to whom stories attached themselves.
But if Clarke was obscure, his commanders had a keen sense of his value. ‘He is irreplaceable,’ wrote General Harold Alexander, then commanding Allied forces in North Africa, in 1943. ‘His mental ingenuity, balance, foresight, tact, character and remarkable personality have achieved results which have contributed more to the successful operations in the Middle East than probably any other officer of his rank.’
Others agreed. ‘By his outstanding intelligence, professional skill, energy and grasp of the many complex problems he has dealt with he has contributed in an unusual degree to the success of Allied campaigns,’ read a citation for the US Legion of Merit signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
What was that work? The short answer is ‘deception’. But that is a little like saying that Robert Oppenheimer worked on bombing. Throughout history, military commanders have sought to mislead their opponents. Dudley Clarke set out to do it on a scale no one had imagined before. Even afterwards, almost no one understood the scale of his achievement.
Clarke thought of himself as developing a new kind of weapon. It was a weapon that helped to deliver victory but it also saved lives, hundreds of thousands of them.
Most unusually for a weapon, it saved the lives of enemy soldiers as well. There are many Germans alive today whose grandfathers owed their survival of the war to this eccentric English soldier.
The success of this weapon depended on secrecy. Very few people knew what Clarke was up to. Even the commanders who were cleared to know about his work struggled to understand it. After the war, he was forbidden from talking about it. Others took credit instead, with stories that were at best exaggerated, and often fictitious.
In recent decades, the opening up of secret wartime files has revealed the scale of the Allied deception operations ahead of D-Day, and the use of double agents to plant false information in Berlin. What has generally been missed is that there was nothing done in London in 1944 that hadn’t been done first in Cairo by 1942. The men who worked on the Normandy landings were Clarke’s disciples, trained by him and using techniques he had invented, tested and refined.
This is the story of how
There is no shortage of documentation around Clarke. His own writings include two volumes of personal memoirs, a history and a novel. His papers contain letters and diaries. All these words reveal him to be an entertaining writer who knew how to tell a tale, but also one practised at deflecting unwanted attention and directing the audience’s eyes elsewhere. Of one of the most critical moments of his own war, he wrote not a word that I can find. He is an easy man to like but, at the deepest level, a difficult man to know.
And so there are parts of Clarke’s story that remain mysterious, hidden even from those closest to him. But it is a good story. Clarke loved good stories.
The Players
ALLIES
Deceivers and allied trades
Dudley Clarke – Head of A Force
David Niven – Movie star, Commando
R. J. Maunsell – Head of Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME)
Tony Simonds – A Force, MI9 coordinator
Eric ‘John’ Shearer – Director of Military Intelligence, Cairo
Vladimir Wolfson – Naval Intelligence, SIME and A Force officer, Istanbul
Kenyon Jones – SIME officer
Warrant Officer Ellis – First wireless operator for Nicosoff
Sergeant Shears – Second wireless operator for Nicosoff
Evan John Simpson – SIME officer
‘Professor’ Eric ‘Titters the Taster’ Titterington – Forger
Geoffrey Barkas – Head of Camouflage
John Hutton – Camouflage officer
Peter Proud – Camouflage officer
Tony Ayrton – Camouflage officer
Brian Robb – Camouflage officer
Jasper Maskelyne – Camouflage officer and then MI9 lecturer
Ralph Bagnold – Founder of the Long Range Desert Group, Middle East Chief Deception Officer, 1941–42
Dominic Macadam-Sherwen, alias Dominique, Vicomte de la Motte – SIME officer
Noel Wild – A Force officer
Michael Crichton – A Force officer
Evangeline Palidou – SIME employee, Blonde Gun Moll
Oliver Stanley – Head of London Controlling Section 1941–42
Johnny Bevan – Head of London Controlling Section 1942–45
Dennis Wheatley – Novelist, London Controlling Section officer
Peter Fleming – Deception officer, Far East
Carl Goldbranson – US liaison to A Force
Harold Burris-Meyer – Sound technician extraordinaire
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr – Movie star, US naval officer
David Strangeways – A Force officer
Daphne Llewellyn – Secretary and organiser of illicit dances, Algiers
Harry Gummer – A Force representative, Gibraltar
Soldiers
John Dill – Chief of the Imperial General Staff, 1940–41
Alan Brooke – Chief of the Imperial General Staff, 1941–46
Dwight Eisenhower – Supreme Allied Commander, Europe 1943–45
Archibald Wavell – Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, 1939–41
Claude Auchinleck – Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, 1941–42
Harold Alexander – Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, 1942–43
Neil Ritchie – Commander, Eighth Army, 1941–42
Bernard Montgomery – Commander, Eighth Army, 1942–43, Allied Ground Forces (Normandy), 1944
Bonner Fellers – US military attaché, Egypt
Freddie de Guingand – Chief of staff, Eighth Army, under Montgomery
Charles Richardson – Planning officer, Eighth Army
M. E. Clifton James – Lieutenant, Pay Corps 1940–46; Commander, Allied Ground Forces (Normandy), 27–30 May, 1944 (sort of).
Spies
Guy Liddell – Deputy Director MI5
Stewart Menzies – Head of MI6
Thomas Argyll ‘TAR’ Robertson – MI5, in charge of double agents
Charles Cholmondeley – MI5 officer, secretary to the Twenty Committee
Ewen Montagu – Naval Intelligence
Ivor Montagu – Soviet Intelligence
Renato Levi – Double agent, notionally working for German intelligence, actually working for British intelligence
Leonard Hamilton Stokes – MI6 Head of Station, Madrid
Paul Nicosoff – Entirely fictional spy, supposedly working for the Germans in Cairo
Marie – Nicosoff’s equally fictional girlfriend
Gilbert Lennox – MI5 officer
Civilians
Sidney Clarke – Uncle, lawyer, magician
Thomas ‘Tibby’ Clarke – Brother, screenwriter
Hermione Ranfurly – Secretary and diarist, Cairo
Alice Sims, Betty-to-You, later Betty Crichton – Dancer, Cairo
Cedric Salter – Journalist, Istanbul
Alexander Clifford – Journalist, Cairo
Diplomats
Miles Lampson – British ambassador to Egypt
Samuel Hoare – British ambassador to Spain
Arthur Yencken – Counsellor, British Embassy in Madrid
William Torr – Military attaché, British Embassy in Madrid
Francis Haselden – British consul in Huelva, Spain
His Majesty’s Government
Alexander Cadogan – Permanent Secretary, Foreign Office
Philip Whitefoord – Deputy Director, Military Intelligence, War Office
Anthony Eden – Foreign Secretary
David Margesson – War Secretary
Lord Gort – Governor of Gibraltar, 1941–42
THE AXIS
Spies
Admiral Canaris – Head of Abwehr
Hans Travaglio – Abwehr officer in Italy
Laszlo Almasy – Desert explorer
Diplomats
Michizo Ohno – Japanese diplomat in Egypt
Soldiers
Erwin Rommel – Commander, Afrika Corps 1941–43, Army Group B 1943–44
Georg Stumme – Rommel’s Afrika Corps deputy
Gerhard von Schwerin – German army officer
Hans-Otto Behrendt – Intelligence officer, Afrika Corps
Ulrich Liss – Head of Army Intelligence
NEUTRALS
Anwar Al-Sadat – Egyptian army officer
Ignacio Molina – Spanish intelligence officer
Setting the Stage 1500 BC–December 1940
All warfare is based on deception. When able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.
Sun Tzu
Chapter 1
A year and a half before the panic of 1942, a 31-year-old captain named Tony Simonds was sitting at his desk in General Headquarters in Cairo, bored out of his mind.
It was December 1940, the end of a year that had seen the map of Europe transformed. Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and half of France were now occupied by the Nazis. The rest of France was a satellite state, run from Vichy. The Royal Air Force and Royal Navy had stopped the Germans at the Channel, but Britain’s army had retreated in disarray first from Norway and then from the continent.
All that had happened thousands of miles away from where Simonds sat. As far as he was concerned, the war was offering depressingly little excitement.
It wasn’t that he disliked his job. He’d seen enough of the army over the past nine years to know that military intelligence was a lot more his line than parade grounds and kit inspections. And he enjoyed being stationed in Egypt. There was none of the rationing or blackouts or bombing that were making life in Britain so miserable. Here there was still the feeling of colonial life in the great days of the empire: watching polo matches, lounging by swimming pools, drinking sundowners at the Continental Hotel, lusting after the belly dancers in Madame Badia’s Cabaret, and after that, well, Cairo was a city ready to cater for every appetite. You had to put up with heat and dust and stink and flies and disease, but it was also a place of adventure with a sense that anything was possible.
