Читать книгу Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire - Calder Walton - Страница 15

The idea of strategic deception – that is, providing false information to misguide an enemy’s strategy – was put to best use by Allied forces in Europe, but it was not originally conceived there. During the so-called phoney war, between the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, the Middle East was the only theatre where British forces were directly fighting Axis forces, and it was there that innovative uses of intelligence for modern military affairs were born. Before either MI5 or SIS had begun to envisage the idea of strategic deception, it was being pioneered by a small, crack intelligence outfit attached to the Cairo-based staff of the British commander in the Middle East, General Archibald Wavell. Wavell was one of the best-educated generals in British military history, a quiet, scholarly type who liked to write poetry in his spare time and had lost an eye in the Great War. He knew the history of Lawrence of Arabia well, and valued the use of intelligence in war. The unit he established was known as ‘A-Force’, and the man he placed in charge of it was a brilliant military intelligence officer, Lt. Col. Dudley Clarke, who came up with a number of ingenious deception ploys. In Clarke’s view, it was possible to do more than prevent secrets reaching an enemy’s intelligence service (counter-espionage): secrets obtained through counter-espionage could also be used to deceive an enemy’s strategy (strategic deception).¹⁸

In 1940 Clarke recruited a young officer, Jasper Maskelyne, who came from a long succession of famous stage magicians and conjurors, to help him build an entire false city out of plywood in the Egyptian desert, three miles from the port of Alexandria. The ‘city’ built by Maskelyne’s group, the so-called ‘Magic Gang’, was apparently so realistic-looking from the air – complete with a false lighthouse and anti-aircraft batteries – that it deceived German bombers, which destroyed it instead of the actual city of Alexandria. To misdirect German bombers, the Magic Gang also used a series of elaborate mirrors to create optical illusions over the Suez Canal in order to obscure intended targets there. A-Force also assisted with deception campaigns before the strategically key Second Battle of El Alamein, fought in the Western Desert of Egypt from October to November 1942. It built 2,000 false tanks to the south of El Alamein, complete with convincing pyrotechnics, which deceived Rommel into thinking that the main Allied attack under Montgomery would come from the south, when in reality it came from the north. Maskelyne had a vested interest in exaggerating his trickery heroics in the post-war account he penned, Magic–Top Secret, because he felt his wartime exploits had not been recognised. Some historians have doubted his tales, but it does seem that he deserves more credit than he has been given. The authors of the official history of British intelligence in the Second World War, who had access to classified records, note Maskelyne’s ‘numerous and valuable contributions’ to Allied visual deception in the Middle East. Thanks to A-Force and the Magic Gang’s trickery, the Germans at El Alamein believed that British forces were 40 per cent larger than they actually were.¹⁹

In October 1941 Clarke travelled to London, where he briefed the War Office on his ideas of strategic deception. The War Office was so impressed that soon afterwards it established a top-secret outfit known as the ‘London Controlling Section’ (LCS). Although its name does not feature in most histories, it was one of the most important – if not the most important – Allied intelligence agencies in the entire Second World War. The LCS only had non-executive powers – to plan, coordinate and supervise – but this did not mean its influence was limited. In the opinion of M.R.D. Foot, the esteemed late official historian of Britain’s wartime sabotage organisation, the Special Operations Executive, the LCS was more important than either MI5, SIS or GC&CS during the war. Headed from May 1942 by Lt. Col. J.H. Bevan, its purpose was to ‘prepare deception plans on a worldwide basis with the object of causing the enemy to waste his military resources’. The actual running of double agents and other deception ploys was carried out by MI5 and the other services, but it was the LCS that had overall responsibility for coordinating all the disinformation sent to Germany and Britain’s other enemies. A-Force’s pioneering efforts in strategic deception in the Middle East therefore inspired the LCS, which then took it to new heights. As the official history of British intelligence in the Second World War noted, a small acorn planted in the deserts of North Africa by Dudley Clarke grew during the war into an enormous tree, spreading across Europe and the British empire.²⁰

The first significant use of strategic deception by the LCS was with Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942. In the run-up to the landings, one of MI5’s prize double agents, a Spanish national, Juan Pujol García, codenamed ‘Garbo’, sent letters to his German handlers with misinformation about the timings of the landings. One of Garbo’s letters gave information from a fictional sub-agent supposedly operating in Britain stating that Allied ships had set sail from Scotland, apparently destined for North Africa. Although the letter contained accurate information, MI5 deliberately delayed it so that it would not arrive until after the actual landings had occurred. The plan worked perfectly: Garbo’s German handlers were thankful for his accurate information, which had unfortunately arrived too late for them. Similar deception material on the Torch landings was passed to Nazi intelligence by the double agent ‘Cheese’, an Italian of Jewish parentage who had been recruited by SIS before the war, but was then also recruited by the Abwehr in France in 1940, and thereafter served as a British double agent. In February 1941 the Abwehr sent Cheese to Egypt, where he secretly worked under the control of MI5’s regional outfit, SIME. He and his MI5 case officers created a fictional sub-agent whom they called ‘Paul Nicosoff’, in reality a British signals officer, who passed over strategic deception material to Nazi intelligence. By the autumn of 1942 Cheese was providing an almost daily service of reports from ‘Paul Nicosoff’, and in the period leading up to Operation Torch was in direct communication with Rommel’s headquarters, furnishing false information on the mobilisation of British forces in the Middle East. By the end of the war Cheese and ‘Paul Nicosoff’ had transmitted 432 messages to the Abwehr station in Cairo, and Ultra decrypts revealed that the Abwehr classified them as reliable. The success of strategic deception in Operation Torch was clear: General Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s closest military adviser, Chief of the Operations Staff of the German High Command (OKW), told Allied interrogators after the war that the landings in North Africa had come as ‘a complete surprise’.²¹

The next major use of strategic deception by the LCS was with Operation Mincemeat, which involved the Allied invasion of Europe from North Africa, opening up a ‘second front’ to relieve pressure on the Soviet forces in the east. Mincemeat deceived the German High Command into thinking that the Allied invasion of Italy, the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’, as Churchill termed it, would not take place in Sicily, as was actually intended, but instead in Sardinia and Greece. Operation Mincemeat, begun in early 1943, was the brainchild of an MI5 officer, Charles Cholmondeley, and a brilliant wartime naval intelligence recruit, Ewen Montagu, who was assisted by another naval intelligence officer, Ian Fleming (the future creator of James Bond). Together they devised an outstanding ruse: to drop a dead body over the side of a ship, carrying supposedly top-secret Allied plans for the invasion of Sardinia. The deceivers were so meticulous in their preparations that they created a complete false persona for the dead body, known as ‘Major Martin’, even putting a photograph of his fictional fiancée (in reality an MI5 staff member) in his wallet and obtaining the stub of a cinema ticket from a showing in London a few nights before his ‘death’. ‘Major Martin’, who in reality had been found in a London morgue, a deceased homeless man without any known relatives, achieved more in death than he apparently ever did in life. After his body was found off the Spanish coast, the German High Command was deceived by the documents in his briefcase that outlined the supposed Allied plans for the invasion of Sardinia, and on Hitler’s personal orders troops were diverted there – even though it would have been perfectly obvious to any child with a school atlas that the Allies’ intended destination from their base in North Africa was Sicily, not Sardinia.²²

The climax of Britain’s wartime deception campaigns was Operation Fortitude, the deception operation paving the way for the Allied cross-Channel invasion of Fortress Europe on D-Day, 6 June 1944 – the largest seaborne invasion in naval history. In preparation for D-Day, MI5’s star double agent Garbo and his MI5 handler, Tomás Harris, passed over voluminous amounts of false strategic intelligence to Germany about non-existent Allied forces stationed in Britain. Garbo helped to fabricate an entire false US army group, ‘the First United States Army Group’ (FUSAG), which was never more than a collection of balsawood tanks and inflatable ships, but just like Dudley Clarke’s previous deceptions in the Egyptian desert, nevertheless looked realistic from the air. The most important misinformation that Garbo supplied to his German spy-masters was a radio message on 5 June 1944 which convinced the German High Command into thinking that the main Allied landings would not be in Normandy, but in the area around Calais. Based on this information, crucial SS Panzer divisions were diverted to Calais, where they awaited an invasion force that would never arrive. Garbo’s deception information, which diverted Nazi forces and allowed the Allies to establish a crucial bridgehead, undoubtedly saved Allied lives. A measure of the value that the Nazi leadership attached to him was that Hitler personally awarded him an Iron Cross, making him the only person ever to have received both a Nazi Iron Cross and a British MBE.²³