All the King's Men (16 page)

In August 1942, immediately following the Dieppe débâcle, Churchill promised Stalin that a proper cross-Channel invasion would materialize in 1943.
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For most of the Combined Chiefs, both British and American, the bloodletting that had taken place during the Dieppe raid had left them sober and cautious about 1943. As planning progressed for the first major Allied operation of the war, the invasion of French North Africa, it became apparent that an invasion of Europe was unlikely to take place before 1944. A week after the North African landings had taken place Churchill wrote, ‘We have pulled in our horns [plans for 1943] to the most remarkable extent and I cannot imagine what the Russians will do or say when they realize it.’
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He was worried that the Russians might conclude that without a second front their situation was hopeless and capitulate or sue for peace. In January 1943, with the North African campaign well under way, the political leaders and military commanders of Britain, America and the Free French met at Casablanca to hammer out the strategic programme for the new year.

Like all conferences, it was partly to do with business and partly to do with the business of being seen to be doing business. President Roosevelt was driven past ranks of GIs in an open-top Jeep, pausing for the cameramen to get shots of him being spontaneously mobbed by the common soldier, while the British Prime Minister provided his own brand of theatre by displaying a remarkable variety of
dress. On the first day he appeared in his tropical suit and topi to take the salute amid the thrashing sails of palm leaves that shrouded all the state buildings. On another day he appeared as Admiral of the Fleet and towards the end, in his double-breasted woollen navy pinstripe and Homburg, looking every bit the Chicago gangster. It was important for domestic morale that the Western leaders emerged with a solid, unified strategy that could be communicated in three-inch headlines.

On 19 January the Allied commanders and the political leaders announced they had come to just such an agreement. ‘Germany will be defeated in 1943.’ As Churchill sat in the Moroccan sunshine, gangster-like and aggressive, surrounded by the ranks of the Combined Chiefs, he reaffirmed the common view, ‘The Allies are determined to enforce Hitler’s unconditional surrender!’, and then he extemporized about ‘an invasion of Europe within nine months’.
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Churchill had done it. He had managed to extract from the Combined Chiefs a commitment towards a number of small-scale cross-Channel operations. Within the top-secret plans was the provision for ‘Amphibious raids that would hopefully provoke air battles. A landing to seize and hold a bridgehead on the Cotentin Peninsula [in France], targeted for 1 August, and – in the event of a German disintegration – a return to Europe.’
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Arrayed around Churchill and Roosevelt, the Combined Chiefs gritted their teeth behind enthusiastic smiles. They knew perfectly well how impossible a return to Europe would be within the next nine months. Nevertheless, back in London they set about trying to put this commitment into practice.

20 March was an historic day for SOE. They received a directive from the Combined Chiefs that formalized the organization’s role and official position with regard to the future operations in Europe, as set out on 19 January:

You are the authority responsible for co-ordinating
sabotage and other subversive activities including the organization of the Resistance Groups, and for providing advice and liaison in all matters in connection with Patriotic Forces up to the time of their embodiment into regular forces.
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The exiled governments could no longer argue about SOE’s right to carry out its clandestine operations in their countries; it was of course a directive aimed at de Gaulle and his people.

It went on to say that SOE should concentrate its efforts to support the Allied strategy for the war, which was to defeat Germany in 1943. The mainstays of the strategy were the invasion of Sicily, an uncompromising bomber offensive on Germany’s war effort and, ‘such limited offensive operations as may be practicable with the amphibious forces available’.

At Baker Street they began to roll up their sleeves and spit on their hands. This directive came as the clearest signal yet that 1943 would at last be the year of the return to Europe. More to the point, the Whitehall mandarins had finally displayed a confidence in the SOE and acknowledged they had a legitimate role to play in the plans for victory. As the first signs of spring began to appear on the trees in Regents Park, an unmistakeable frisson swept down the corridors of Baker Street. But although the Combined Chiefs of the regular services had acknowledged that SOE had a role to play, within the cloistered environment of the intelligence community they were still regarded as an amateur secret service.

Since the invasion of North Africa, Allied strategic planning had made provision for simultaneous ‘deception plans’ that would be operated before and alongside the real military operation to encourage confusion in the enemy and disguise the true objective. If there was one
aspect of military planning at which the British were pre-eminent, it was in the inventiveness of these masterpieces of strategic deception. So elaborate were these plans, that to some American strategists, it seemed the British were ‘preoccupied with theatrical shows of force, in preference to the real thing’.

The Allies’ joint headquarters were established at Norfolk House in St James’s Square under the stewardship of the genial General Frederick Morgan, officially titled Chief of Staff (to the future) Supreme Allied Commander; COSSAC. His initial priority was the invasion of France in 1943. At COSSAC (Morgan’s title was also used to describe his headquarters) a sub-section of Operations Department, Ops B, was responsible for the administration of deception plans. Downstream from Ops B were a number of organizations that were responsible for inventing and then executing the plans. The man most closely associated with these deception plans was John (Johnny) Bevan, the Controlling Officer of Deception, who led a committee of highly inventive individuals called the London Controlling Section. The LCS, created in April 1941, was another of Churchill’s brainchildren. An organization that would invent vast games of illusion and deception for which Churchill himself was often the greatest inspiration and which, like the pugnacious Prime Minister, was required to steel its heart to all the dark iniquities that such deception entailed.

Bevan had not been the first choice. Colonel Oliver Stanley, the first Controlling Officer, had resigned at the time of the Dieppe raid rather than be involved with deception plans to shroud that raid – an operation that he felt was suicidal and would serve no greater strategic purpose than to keep alive German expectations of an Allied invasion of France in 1942. The particular principle over which he felt so strongly was a suggestion that the SOE should be asked to deliberately misinform its agents
in France to expect an imminent invasion. It was the kind of deception for which Stanley had no stomach. Colonel John Bevan on the other hand, a stockbroker with ancestral ties to the City, was a man much closer to the heart of ‘the great game’.

From LCS, the ideas for deceiving the Germans were channelled through various agencies – MI6, MI5 and the XX (Double Cross) Committee, by what was known as ‘Special Means’, i.e. controlled leakage. The most commonly used vectors were the ‘controlled’ German agents that were operated by the XX Committee. But they also planted false stories in the press or through the BBC, and even forged letters to POWs laced with false information for the benefit of the German censors. They were extraordinarily inventive and ultimately extremely successful. But like ULTRA, the running of deception plans was regarded as a secret of the highest classification. Even to the present day the British Government is in two minds about what should and what should not be published about World War Two strategic deception. It can be no surprise that SOE were kept well out of the picture when it came to the details of deception plans. In the view of one of the members of the Double Cross Committee: ‘They were regarded as horribly insecure. They weren’t brought in on any of the really secret stuff. They were simply regarded as being terribly amateurish.’
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However, in the view of John Bevan, SOE did have a role to play in strategic deception – an unwitting role. Just as the press and the BBC were exploited as channels through which disinformation could be passed the SOE was regarded, ‘as a legitimate organization for exploitation at the disposal of the London Controlling Officer’.
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In other words their very amateurish qualities were exploitable.

One of the few things that went according to plan during the Allied invasion of North Africa was the deception plan. Following that success, deception became all the rage
in London and the Prime Minister was among its most ardent advocates. The danger with using SOE as a channel for deception was that it threatened to destroy a precious and non-renewable asset, the French willingness to resist.

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Down to Business

At Norfolk House, General Frederick Morgan and his COSSAC team had worried over the problem of the planned invasion of France. Their major priority had always been the invasion of Sicily and as the plans for that operation crystallized, it became more and more obvious that the invasion of France was not going to be possible in 1943. The cross-Channel operation was doomed because of limited resources and imprecise objectives, but that argument wasn’t going to go far with Churchill. The issue was left for as long as possible – in fact, until the first week of April when the Chiefs of Staff presented Churchill with some cold hard figures. The Allies had enough landing craft for the Sicily landing, but not for France as well. If Sicily came first, and it would, then it would take four months to transport and make ready the same craft for the cross-Channel operation. That meant it would not be possible to mount the operation before winter, which was out of the question.
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Churchill’s commitment to the Russians was at stake. He took these painfully hard details away and lived with them for a week. Then finally, on 10 April, he notified the Chiefs of Staff that he concurred with their view but that ‘these facts should not become widely known’ – and that at the earliest opportunity ‘an elaborate camouflage and cover operation’ should be mounted to conceal them.
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All he had to do now was break the news to Stalin.

Meanwhile, on 26 April, General Morgan was informed
that the real invasion of France would now take place in the spring of 1944 and that the original operation to seize and hold a bridgehead on the French coast had given way to a deception plan. He had been given full command of Churchill’s ‘camouflage and cover operation’, entitled Operation COCKADE. The Prime Minister’s views were made clear: the absence of a real operation must be completely disguised from the enemy and all measures should be explored to ensure success.

But already there was a flaw, a critical flaw that would only become apparent long after the dust had settled. The virtue of a deception plan was that it was a cloak cast round a real operation to disguise from the enemy the actual objective. Here there was no ‘real operation’ to disguise, it was a cloak cast round nothing at all.
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On 30 April, the Chiefs of Staff delivered a report that formalized the Prime Minister’s wishes and pride of place was given to Operation COCKADE, ‘a vast scheme of cover and deception’ to keep alive the expectation of an invasion of France and so pin the German forces in the west. The target date for this phantom invasion had to be set late enough to give them enough time to set it up, but not so late in the year that it stretched credulity. The first week in September was judged the latest possible date.
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It had not escaped their notice that this had been the month the Germans had planned to invade Britain in 1940. The only spot along the coast that could accommodate an invasion force of any size was Calais – which became the geographical focus of all their plans. The Allies’ first Commander in Chief was not destined to orchestrate the return of Allied troops to French soil, but instead to direct a rather elaborate piece of amateur dramatics, on a scale that would have satisfied Cecil B. de Mille.

At Baker Street, SOE received no indication that the grand strategic plan had been altered. Quite the contrary. SOE, and F Section in particular, were encouraged to believe the invasion of France was imminent. Drops of
arms and equipment to the networks in France had, after a brief hiatus during December because of bad weather, resumed and remained steady. Then suddenly, in April, there was a massive leap of more than two thousand per cent. The total number of Sten guns, incendiaries, pistols and grenades that the networks had received in the previous five months was doubled in the month of April alone. The build-up was staggering. From 32 Stens in March to 644 in April; 34 grenades in March to 421 in April; 162 kilos of high explosives delivered in March, 2508 kilos in April. In May, the figures doubled again, and more than doubled again in June.
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During that April, the PROSPER network received over 20 containers of arms, by far the lion’s share of material sent to France. An infectious mood of expectation spread throughout the twelve Départementes the network covered. Local sub-circuits were thrown into an unprecedented level of activity. Pierre Culioli and Yvonne Rudellat were out nearly three times a week with their teams, laying flare paths and then rushing to gather up the containers dropped from what seemed like a continuous relay of Halifaxes. All over their area, well supplied armouries were being secreted in barns, in chicken houses, anywhere. Francis Suttill now stood at the head of the largest SOE network in Europe. From the Ardennes to the Atlantic coast, thousands of Frenchmen had been drawn into his embrace. He felt, with the arrival of spring, a step closer to the point and purpose of his mission, to what he saw as his destiny.