PREFACE

The deceiver by stratagem leaves it to the person himself whom he is deceiving to commit the errors of understanding which at last, flowing into one result, suddenly change the nature of things in his eyes.1 (von Clausewitz)

WRITING OVER 400 YEARS BEFORE Caesar attempted to invade the British Isles, the legendary ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu

Pronounced, ‘All warfare is based on deception.’ Aside from the days of chivalry, when rival heralds would agree a fixed time and place for battle to commence, or when officers invited their opponents to fire first, commanders have often resorted to ruses and devious stratagems to mislead and stupefy their opponents.

During World War II the military deception practised by the Western Allies was so sophisticated it is unlikely to be repeated on the same scale again. Principally a British creation, at the crucial part of the war, when the Allies began the liberation of France, entire German divisions were held back from the fighting or delayed in their arrival because Hitler and his generals had been duped into deploying them elsewhere.

To summarize, the cornerstone of this success was security. In the 1940s Britain was an island with a watchful and vigilant public on high alert. It was not an environment conducive to German spies. Worse still, from the German point of view, the Germans’ chief spy in Britain at the beginning of the war was also working for the British. Through information provided by this agent British code-breakers were able to break the German secret service’s codes, which allowed them to be forewarned when new spies were despatched.

Where the British were incredibly smart — or perhaps devious would be a better word — was in the way that they used the captured agents. Despite a general clamouring to have captured spies executed, wherever possible the spies were kept active and given controlled information to pass back to their masters. This practice was also employed by the British security services in the Middle East with equal success. Before long, there grew a need for organizations that could vet the information passed back by the spies. This was to ensure that nothing operationally vital was accidentally leaked, and to ensure a consistent approach to German intelligence questionnaires.

This led to the establishment of a system of global deception, ensuring the coordination of misinformation provided to the German intelligence services. From Kabul to Lisbon, and Nairobi to Reykjavik, the German intelligence stations were fed a picture entirely of the Allies’ making, all of which was digested, sent to Berlin and placed before Hitler and his staff. As Nazi High Command pondered and deliberated, the progress of these bogus reports was monitored at the British code-breaking establishment at Bletchley Park. By reading the German intelligence services’ secret traffic, the deception planners were able to tweak the performances of their best channels. It allowed them to play on the fears of the German High Command, or to endorse the delusions Hitler most wanted to believe.

Of course, there were a number of means by which to deceive the enemy other than through double agents. The first and most obvious was by physical means — by the use of camouflage to hide what could be seen, or to make it appear to be something else. This included the creation of dummy installations, vehicles and even ships, which might confuse enemy reconnaissance. There was also the possibility of deceiving one’s opponent by emitting false signals traffic, which the enemy ‘Y Service’ (radio intercept service) would intercept. In much the same way that the ancients would count the campfires of an enemy army, by World War II one could count the number of radios on the air, and, by the urgency of their operation and movement, forecast intentions without necessarily being able to understand the language used. Thus we find dedicated teams of radio operators driving round deserts and the fields of south-east England, reproducing the noise and chatter of colossal phantom armies, which double agents had already led the Nazi hierarchy to believe existed.

The third means of deceiving the enemy was the use of psychological warfare, through what came to be known as ‘Black propaganda’. The British conducted a masterly campaign, planting rumours and gossip among the German soldiery and command and even setting up radio stations and newspapers purporting to be the work of the Germans themselves. These factors combined to form a symphony of lies, delivered and orchestrated by the highest and most secret branches of the Allied command structure, ones that few people knew of and even fewer appreciated or understood.

True enough, no one doubts that the liberation of Europe was a result of the fighting men at the sharp end of the conflict. Deception was by no means a guarantor of success, and many cover plans failed to work, went unnoticed, or were completely ignored by the German military and High Command. In many cases, Allied commanders were distrustful of their purpose and Suspicious of the practitioners, seeing them as diverting resources away from the real task at hand. However, even in those cases where deception plans gave no tangible benefit, neither did they do any harm.

It is no coincidence that for the Western Allies the biggest turning points in the war against Hitler — El Alamein, the Torch landings in North Africa, the invasions of Sicily and Normandy — were all backed by elaborate and well-executed cover plans, which were promoted by the double agents. This is not to say that these operations would have failed without them, but victory would almost certainly have come at a much higher price: perhaps even too high a price.

On a personal note, I was introduced to this subject by my father, who did important work during the 1980s in helping to document Kent’s World War II invasion and anti-aircraft defences. Although principally interested in ack-ack, my father came across an interesting story about how a decoy for Chatham naval base was built on the marshes near the Isle of Sheppey. A man who had worked at the site during the war explained that at night they would use lighting effects to simulate doors opening and closing, and other breaches of the blackout instructions. The Germans would see these pinpricks of light and deduce they were over their target. Once the bombs started to rain down, the operator would ignite large tanks of oil and other flammable material. Water would be sprayed onto the fires to create large plumes of steam, and give German pilots the impression that firemen were trying to extinguish the blaze. Adding to my fascination with this ruse, my father then told me about a double agent called Garbo who tricked the Germans into thinking the D-Day invasion was due to arrive at Calais rather than Normandy. After several years of research I know that this story was just the tip of the iceberg. I have remained fascinated by this subject ever since, and hope this work will help introduce others to the world of double cross and deception during World War II.

Much of the secret material relating to this subject has now been declassified by the British Security Service, but it must be remembered that this was not a story that the authorities wanted told. Not realizing that Soviet spies like Kim Philby had long since betrayed the secret of Britain’s wartime deceptive apparatuses, the story of double cross, deception and codebreaking remained a closely guarded secret after the war. The memoirs of Churchill, Eisenhower and Montgomery all allude to certain stratagems employed to hoodwink the Nazis, but with conflict against the Soviets a real possibility, they did not want to reveal their most secretive tricks of the trade.

Until the dam began to burst in the 1970s, only a handful of deception operations trickled into the public consciousness. One of the most well-known operations was told in the film The Man Who Never Was (1956) based on the book by Ewen Montagu, one of the real planners behind Operation Mincemeat, the planting of bogus information on a corpse left adrift off Spain. Another ruse, albeit told with great artistic licence, led to the making of I Was Monty’s Double (1958), a film starring M. E. Clifton James, who reprised his real wartime role for the cameras. The first inkling that double agents might have been used came with The Eddie Chapman Story (1953). The actual spy involved, Eddie Chapman, came out with his own version of events — The Real Eddie Chapman Story (1966) — which found its way onto movie screens as Triple Cross in the same year.

The sense that something big was waiting to come out was increased by the arrival of The Counterfeit Spy (1971), by journalist and ex-Black propagandist Denis Sefton Delmer. This ostensibly introduced the world to the career of the double agent Garbo, whom Delmer gave the codename Cato. In 1972 the former MI5 officer and Oxford don J. C. Masterman circumvented officialdom by releasing his book The Double-Cross System in America. This account was originally written as an official report at the end of the war. In it Masterman detailed the extent to which the British ‘Twenty Committee’ controlled Nazi espionage and double crossed their controllers. The report also made mention of one of the Twenty Committee’s biggest ‘customers’, the London Controlling Section, the organization responsible for global deception policy.

In 1974 theYugoslav Dusko Popov released his highly readable memoirs, Spy/Counterspy. Although certain names were changed, and certain situations somewhat enhanced to fit Popov’s billing as ‘the real James Bond’, they fleshed out Masterman’s story. However, many of Masterman’s former colleagues saw his publication as a betrayal of trust and they retained their silence. The most partisan champion of ‘the deceivers’ was David Mure, a former member of the A Force deception organization in the Middle East. Mure was scathing of Masterman and highly prejudiced against what he called the ‘private armies’ of the security services and others. Despite this bias, which with the hindsight of several decades does appear unfortunate, Mure’s book Master of Deception (1980) is useful. Partly based on the unpublished memoirs of Dudley Clarke, the commander of A Force, it contains a foreword by Noel Wild, Clarke’s one time deputy and also head of deception on Eisenhower’s staff at the time of the Normandy invasions. Mure’s work is complemented by the excellent work Trojan Horses by Martin Young and Robbie Stamp. This contained numerous important accounts given by those actively involved in deception, including David Strangeways, the implementer of the D-Day deceptions.

Over the course of a decade, more and more information came to light about the secret war — much unearthed by the trailblazing author Nigel West and, more officially, through the publication of Professor Hinsley’s multi-volume official history, British Intelligence in the Second World War (1979—90). The fourth volume of this work is particularly useful and is complemented by Michael Howard’s volume Strategic Deception in the Second World War, publication of which was much delayed by the Thatcher government. More recently, since the turn of the millennium, interest in deception and the double cross system has continued to grow. The most important publication in this period came from Thaddeus Holt in The Deceivers (2004). This weighty tome sets out, really for the first time, the American angle on deception, and is absolutely essential from that point of view.

In terms of information on double agents, we have benefited from the declassification of a number of Security Service documents, in particular the Guy Liddell diaries. Although occasionally ‘weeded’ for information still considered too sensitive for our knowledge, the minutes from Twenty Committee meetings and the dossiers of individual double agents are also available. Many of these have been consulted for this work and give a great level of detail and wonderful colour to the agents’ stories.

Following the release of this information, it is time to revisit the story of the double agents and their controllers in detail and to show how, through the formation of the Twenty Committee in 1941, the British double cross system expanded, was copied in other theatres, and ultimately became the most profitable means by which Allied deception planners could sell their lies to German Intelligence. Without the availability of double agents like Garbo, Tricycle, Tate and Brutus, it is unlikely the deceivers would have attained anything like as much success as they did. In return, without dedicated organizations providing the double agents with material to feed back to their controllers, none of the named cases would have survived very long without their duplicity being discovered. For that reason, the value of the double agents must be reasserted and their activities set in the proper context.

Although the arts of deception and double cross were practised by other nations during the war, the aim of this book in covering the origins of the double cross, the deception agencies and how they developed from Deterring the German invasion of England to protecting the Allies’ eventual return to the Continent, means that there is a focus on activities in Britain and by the British during the war. In keeping with the informal atmosphere of the wartime secret services, names, once introduced, are given informally without accompanying rank. Also in keeping with the style of the day, the terms MI6 or SIS refer to the British Secret Intelligence Service and are used interchangeably throughout for colour and accuracy.