History's Secret Heroes: Series 3: Dudley Clarke: The Great Deceiver

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In October 1941, an urgent cable was received at the Foreign Office in London.

It was this odd story about

a man who had been arrested, and I quote here, in a main street in Madrid, dressed down to a Brazilia as a woman.

This Englishman wore a floral patterned dress, high heels, stockings, elbow length gloves and a turban and was carrying a handbag.

While cross-dressing may not have been specifically illegal in Spain at the time, he certainly caught the attention of the authorities.

It was an outrage to public decency, I guess we would have called it in Britain.

During his interrogation, the man told the Spanish police that he was a novelist who wanted to study the reactions of men to women in the street.

But when the British Consul visited the man in his cell, he claimed he was taking the feminine garments to a lady in Gibraltar and thought he would try them on for a prank.

Inside the Foreign Office, the cable was passed around.

And they're all laughing a light bit of fun, slightly sniggering about this odd bull indulging himself in private and getting caught out.

But soon it became clear this was no laughing matter.

The arrested man was Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke.

The Foreign Office knew he was traveling on the continent.

An arrest for cross-dressing was not part of the plan.

There's

frantic messages back and forth while he's sitting in a Spanish prison cell, literally discussing how this man lost his mind.

During wartime, it was not uncommon for soldiers to have breakdowns.

Whatever the truth, though, the British needed to get Colonel Clark out of that prison cell fast.

Because what they know that the diplomats in Madrid don't know and that crucially that the Spanish police don't know and that the German intelligence who are very active in Madrid hopefully don't know is that Clark's head is absolutely full.

of British military secrets.

I'm Helena von McCarter and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Secret Heroes.

True stories of deception, acts of resistance, and courage from World War II.

Dudley Clark, the Great Deceiver.

Though there was fighting elsewhere in Egypt by 1940, in the capital Cairo, officers could still live a pleasant and chic lifestyle.

It's cocktails on the veranda and servants, polo, swimming in the pool, siestas, sundowners.

Robert Hutton is a political journalist and author of books about intelligence history, including The Illusionist.

the true story of the man who fooled Hitler.

It's also far enough away from Britain that the rules are a little bit different.

So it's sexually a much more licentious place.

People misbehaved themselves all over the place.

A lot of young women went out there because all the young men were out there having a ball.

They weren't worrying about the cheese ration or whatever.

Sally Ann Olivier is Dudley Clarke's goddaughter.

He was a lousy godfather, but I admire him tremendously.

And I could see why my father adored him.

Sally Ann's father, Lieutenant Colonel Tony Simmons, worked with Dudley Clarke in Cairo.

On the 18th of December 1940, Simmons was given orders to collect Colonel Clarke from Cairo Airport.

He was told to look out for a quiet man, for Clarke would be travelling incognito.

Dudley...

came off in the most loud pair of golfing plus fours and a sort of played jacket with an enormous tie that looked absolutely ghastly.

He would have stood out a mile and he pretended to be American.

And so everyone thought, oh my god, look at that American, you know, nobody thought that it was the sort of slightly quiet person who Dudley actually was.

He created his persona by making it enormous, not by hiding and pretending not to be there and standing behind a potted plant.

He went out to be boom.

During their time together in Cairo, Simmons came to like Clark.

He drew people to him like a sort of pied piper.

People who were looking for adventure or something.

They all lived this sort of life that it was all,

let's live for the moment, we might die tomorrow.

So he was make the most of what we did.

So they loved life, they loved love, they loved drink, they loved anything that they had.

Had to be done to excess because it was living because they might die.

The British fought hard to keep control of North Africa.

Ever since Italy had invaded Egypt in 1940, the region had been embroiled in a tug-of-war between German and Italian Axis powers and allies, led in the region by Britain and including troops from across the British Empire.

If the area were to fall to the Axis, it would be a boon to Adolf Hitler.

They were all lived on a knife edge and they all lived for the moment.

You know, when we weren't fighting, we'd go out and have a hell of a night and we'd play cards or we'd go to the cabaret or we'd do something.

You had this mixture of sort of sophisticated glamour and war.

It was quite extraordinary.

Dudley Clark was born in Johannesburg in 1899.

His father made a small fortune in gold mines.

They were an unconventional family.

Dudley wants to live beyond his means and is able to because his father has become a wealthy man and his father is loving and indulgent.

Clark was also close to his uncle Sidney, a conjurer who was one of the founders of the magician society known as the Magic Circle.

Sidney taught his nephew magic tricks.

I think as a child, you can imagine him always being slightly naughty.

Not too naughty, but just a bit naughty, or doing a trick or something.

He was sent to boarding school.

There, he was impressed by the smart uniforms of the officers of the Royal Flying Corps, stationed at the nearby base in Aldershot.

War breaks out when Clark is 14 years old, and Clark, like all of his friends, is desperate to get into it and spends World War I trying but failing to get into the war because he's too young and

he is heartbroken when World War I ends.

Though he had not seen active service, Clark remained in the military.

When he wasn't training, he spent his time in the theatre, reviving the Royal Artillery Officers Dramatic Club.

He wrote and directed pantomimes.

In 1936, he was a staff officer stationed in Mandatory Palestine during during the Arab uprising against British rule.

There, he encountered guerrilla fighters who struck fast and disappeared.

Clark had to ensure troops were positioned at the right location with the right supplies.

He's described by someone who worked with him as the complete military Jeeves.

He's one of these people who, at the point at which you say, would it be possible for us to do something?

We'll hand you a piece of paper saying, well, I think we're just about to do it, sir.

Here you are.

I've already worked it out for you.

In May 1940, Clark was back in Britain, a military assistant at the War Office.

Morale was low.

Hitler's forces were on a winning streak.

How could the British recover their fighting spirit?

Clarke's suggestion was sparked by his memories of guerrilla fighters in Palestine.

Why shouldn't we have British commanders to work the same mosquito tactics?

This is Dudley Clarke himself, speaking years later on the BBC Home Service.

Hit sharp and quick, then run to fight another day.

And with that thought, there had come, almost automatically, the proper name for these new guerrillas.

They became the commandos from then onwards.

Inspired by his childhood in South Africa and the Boer Commandos, Clark drafted a paper on this new type of soldier.

He had to be young, fit, intelligent and self-reliant, and with an independent sort of character.

A small band of commandos could launch raids into occupied territory, then disappear.

That would be followed by the night dash across the sea, a few breathless minutes for the landing, then the fighting on the shore, the return sea crossing, until in the end the commando came back home again to restart its training for the next attack.

Clark's idea was authorized just days later by the newly appointed Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.

Churchill liked Maverick ideas, and Colonel Clark had plenty of them.

In the war between the Axis and allies in North Africa, the great prize was the Suez Canal, the slim route through Egypt that allowed goods to travel between Asia and Europe.

Much of the machinery of war now ran on oil, and the canal was by far the quickest route between the oilfields of the Persian Gulf and Europe.

While Britain held the canal, it had a considerable advantage.

If the Axis powers took it, it would create a potentially fatal vulnerability.

The battlefield was Egypt's western desert, which the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, was particularly keen to win.

To Mussolini, who's a fascist and who has all these sorts of memories of ancient Rome, there is also a distinct appeal to bringing Egypt back into the new Roman Empire that he is trying to build.

Italian troops outnumbered the British nearly 10 to 1.

The Axis was making ground in the Western Desert.

The British needed a boost.

Clark was summoned to Cairo.

There he set up a new special division concentrating on intelligence for deception.

He was assigned an office in the British headquarters, a building known as Grey Pillars.

Which is in a state of sort of permanent chaos.

Somebody says it had the atmosphere of a busy department store that was trying to stay open while undergoing renovations.

Clark's office was a converted bathroom.

That wouldn't do.

So he finds another set of offices sharing a building with a high-class brothel.

Often though, Clark could be found elsewhere.

The loneliness of a crowded cinema was his favorite working environment.

He loved films and he would sit there in a corner of the cinema watching a film, coming up with plans, discussing the plans with colleagues who had been summoned to sit in a cinema.

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In January 1941, British troops were moving south into Sudan.

The Italians held Eritrea and the Allies hoped to take it.

Clark created a fake story that the troops were instead destined for the British outpost of Aden on the south coast of the Arabian Peninsula.

From there, he wanted the Italians to believe the British would launch an amphibious landing to retake another territory the Italians then held, British Somaliland.

And the idea, therefore, is that the Italians will move troops to meet that, and they will move them away from the border with Sudan, which is where the real attack is going to come.

This was Operation Camilla, a classic misdirection.

Clark rerouted post for the troops to Aden, increased messages between Cairo and Aden, and gave the troops enough supplies for a long journey.

All to give the impression that that Somaliland was the true target.

And Operation Camilla is a complete success.

The Italians completely believe that the British are going to land on the coast.

Operation Camilla may have been a success, but the military attack on Eritrea was a disaster.

Because the Italians believed Clark's cover story that the British were about to attack Somaliland, they pulled their troops out and back into Eritrea.

Clark learned an important lesson.

It's not about what you want the enemy to think.

It's about what you want the enemy to do.

And

that sounds basic, but he spends the whole war trying to explain this.

It doesn't matter what Hitler thinks, it matters what Hitler does.

Over the next few months in Cairo, Clark honed his methods of deception.

He sent the RAF to photograph locations so the enemy could see them and believe these were places of interest.

In In fact, they were not.

Clark had learned these tricks as a child from his uncle Sidney.

One of the things a magician knows is that where he is looking is where the audience will look.

Not to look at what you're actually doing, but to look at the thing that you want the audience to be interested in.

When Clark heard the Italians were concerned about paratroopers, he thinks, well, if they're worried about British paratroopers, we should give them some British paratroopers.

So he created an imaginary unit, the 1st Special Air Service Battalion, known as the SAS.

He called his own team A-Force, a name designed to be vague and mysterious.

He recruited two soldiers to wear parachute patches on their shoulders that said one SAS and wander around Cairo, trying to be noticed by enemy spies.

Clark gave the soldiers details of their fake unit and even told them what to complain about.

He's got this sort of novelist eye for what is the vivid little detail.

You know, the, oh, well,

we don't like this gun, we don't like this plane, we wish we'd had a bit more training, that kind of thing.

Just the kind of the memorable thing that makes things look convincing.

All of these techniques worked.

Early in 1941, the Allies successfully drove the front west away from the Suez Canal.

They took thousands of Italian troops prisoner on the way.

The campaign was going so well that Churchill redeployed British troops troops from North Africa to Greece.

In February 1941, concerned by Allied domination in North Africa, Hitler sent a German force to support the Italians in the Western Desert.

The general commanding this force would be perhaps the most admired and feared military man on the Axis side, Erwin Rommel.

Rommel is a nightmare.

from a deception point of view because what Clark is doing is he's sort of passing these puzzle pieces to intelligence officers and and all of this stuff takes time.

The pieces took time to be created and planted and the information took longer to work its way up the enemy's chain of command.

But Rommel isn't waiting for his own intelligence officers to tell him anything.

Rommel's intelligence is what he can see.

And it's all very well Clark saying, oh, well, you know, the British forces in Libya are tremendously strong.

Rommel can see that they're retreating.

Clark had been used to cautious Italian commanders, who took time to ensure supply lines before attacking.

Rommel doesn't care.

Rommel's view is, we'll get the supplies from the places we capture.

We'll get the supplies from the troops we capture ahead of us.

And so Clark realises he's going to have to do all of this in a different way.

The British needed something more sophisticated.

Clark got to work.

But the British authorities' faith in Clark was tested to breaking point later that that year.

That was the point when he was arrested in Madrid for cross-dressing.

An argument between the military, diplomats and government played out across London and Madrid.

Spain was neutral in the war, but under the national dictator Francisco Franco, it had strong political sympathies with the Axis powers.

If the Spanish allowed Nazi agents to interrogate Clark, it could be a disaster.

The Spanish had already searched Clark's luggage and found a notebook full of names of contacts in London.

They also took photographs of him in his feminine attire, which reached the British Prime Minister.

Churchill's view is, has this man lost his mind?

And that's not a stupid question.

You know, whatever your view of what he's doing, for him to be doing this in

Madrid is a stupid risk.

It is a stupid risk.

The War Office secured Clark's release from his Spanish prison cell.

To this day, nobody knows exactly what he was doing in Madrid, dressed as a woman.

He tells his commanders that this was a carefully calibrated plan to work his way in with German intelligence, which

it's not impossible that that is actually true at some level.

But we never quite get to the bottom of it.

Clark passed a psychological assessment and returned to duty in Cairo.

There he devised a plan to fight Rommel in North Africa.

By October 1942 the fighting in Egypt was concentrated on 60 miles of desert near a town to the west of Cairo called El Alamein.

The Allies were holding the German army but the Germans were determined to push through.

They can see the prize is Cairo and it's just out of reach and if they can just get to Cairo then in Cairo there are supplies.

Leading the the British troops was General Bernard Montgomery.

In the First Battle of El Alamein, Dudley Clarke's tactics bought the British forces extra time.

Now, in the second battle, Montgomery planned to attack from the northern end of the desert strip.

He wanted Clarke's help.

The problem that they've got, as it is laid out to Clarke, is that they need to move hundreds of thousands of men and hundreds of tanks up to the front to prepare to attack in a desert

on a space as it is put as flat as a billiard table there is nowhere to hide anything but monty would really like it if his attack could be a surprise clark began to devise operation bertram he knew he wouldn't be able to hide the battle preparations but he could deflect the enemy's attention.

The assault was planned for the end of October, but Clark wanted Rommel to believe it wouldn't happen until November.

So Clark ordered soldiers and trusted senior officers to book themselves hotel rooms in Cairo for late October.

He hoped to create the impression that the British were holding a strategic summit there.

But how could the British secretly move troops to the northern end of El Elamein without the Germans noticing?

It was impossible.

So Clark pulled another idea from his conjurer's bag of tricks.

He couldn't hide the troops, but he might be able to convince the Germans they weren't there for a real fight.

The story they are going to tell the Germans is that there is going to be a feint attack in the north and the real attack is going to be in the south.

In reality, the British were planning the opposite.

So what you want the Germans to see

is troops slowly massing at the southern end of the line.

And it's not just troops, it's also supplies.

And all of those things need to be built up ahead of the attack.

And at the same time, what they want to do is have an actual army building up in the north with supplies and with tanks

ready to attack at the end of October.

The British recruited a team who knew how to fool the eye.

This included artists, filmmakers, and even a professional magician.

One of the things that a stage magician has to deal with is the fact that everything they're doing, they are doing in plain sight.

They have the same problem that the British Army have in the desert.

In the desert, you can see for miles.

There is nowhere to hide.

And just as a magician will draw attention to actions that aren't important while trying to conceal what's really happening,

Clark will draw attention to some things that are happening and talk a lot about those while, on the quiet, do the bits of the trick that really matter.

Clark's team created the illusion of a fake army at the southern end of the line while hiding a real army at the northern end.

Every evening the Germans saw British forces advance but then hold position in the middle of the strip going neither north nor south.

In the dead of the night, when they could not be seen, the tanks would move to the northern end of the line.

There, they were hidden under sunshields.

Which are basically wood and canvas and metal covers that make them look like trucks.

And those sunshields have been sitting there on barrels for weeks now.

So the German reconnaissance have got used to seeing what looks like trucks scattered.

in the north that aren't going anywhere.

They're not doing anything.

There's obviously just

a big parking space for the British.

Royal Engineers followed the tanks north and rubbed out the tracks they left in the sand.

Meanwhile, another tank unit moved to the middle of the line to replace the original tank unit that had been there earlier in the evening.

Every night, more tanks moved north, yet every morning it looked like nothing had changed at all.

At the southern end of the line, Clark created the illusion of intense military build-up.

His team even built a dummy water pipeline made of disused cans.

From the air though, it looked real enough.

This dummy pipeline implied that the British were setting up supply lines for a big attack at the southern end of the desert.

Thanks to the slow progress of construction, it backed up the impression that nothing would happen till November.

On the 23rd of October, 1942, British forces were ready to attack.

The German German intelligence reports on the day that the Battle of El Alamein begins are essentially say nothing to report, nothing to see here.

No noticeable changes at the front.

Dudley Clarke had successfully hidden an army in the desert.

Around 10 o'clock that evening, the British opened fire at the northern end of El Alamein.

It's hell on earth.

Even the British soldiers are terrified by the level of noise.

And this is a total surprise to the Germans.

Rommel is not even in Africa when the attack plays.

Rommel has been ill and he's recuperating in the Alps, but

he has gone away confident that there is no imminent attack.

Allied forces advanced through German minefields.

The Germans still can't work out what's happening.

There seem to be tanks moving in the south.

Is that the real focus?

But there are reports coming from the north that there are tanks.

Is that the real focus?

What's going on?

The second battle of El Alamein continued for over two weeks before the Allies claimed victory.

The Battle of El Alamein was won by

tanks and men and very, very hard fighting.

And

no one should be under the impression that deception is what won it.

But

does it help the British?

that their attackers are complete surprise.

Yes.

Does it help the British that Rommel is in the wrong country, on the wrong continent when they attack?

Absolutely it does.

On the German side, there was no equivalent of Clark's deception tricks.

Churchill said, before Alamein there were only defeats and after Alamein there were only victories, which is not quite true, but feels true.

It is definitely a turning point.

And when the Germans are retreating after the Battle of Alamein, there will be no fight back.

After that, they are always going backwards.

Clark used his skills again during Operation Mincemeat, which successfully provided cover for the Allied invasion of Sicily.

His techniques were used during the D-Day landings to make Germans think that the Allies were attacking Calais, not Normandy.

Deception proved essential to winning the Second World War.

After the war, Clark wanted to tell the world about his adventures.

Because he wants the glory.

You know, he's...

Clark is not a man without vanity, and he wants people to know what he did.

And he thinks it's fun.

He wants people to know.

He wants people to understand.

He hoped to write an official history of A-Force.

He also wrote an outline for a film.

Naval and military intelligence refused permission for both of these projects.

The Top Brass aren't having this.

They are furious about all of the top secret leaks that are coming out.

And their basic view is, no, we're going to keep everything secret.

And so he is forbidden from doing this.

Clark left the army and took a job in the Conservative Party, developing opinion polls.

Sally Ann watched her father and Clark struggle to adapt to civilian life.

They found it quite difficult to settle into ordinary life afterwards.

They found it very boring to be what was normal.

Clark never married or had children.

He led a quiet life in a flat in London until his death in 1974.

Essentially dies in genteel obscurity.

A short obituary was published in the Times.

A couple of weeks later, the paper published an anonymous letter.

That says,

well, look, he did a bit more and we're still not allowed to talk about it, but no one who worked with him will ever forget him.

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