To Trick the Nazis, This Master of Deception Invented Fake Fleets and Armies

The officer commanding the British garrison on Cyprus was worried. It was 1941, and another Mediterranean island, Crete, had just fallen to a daring airborne attack by the Nazis. Cyprus was far less well defended than Crete had been. Was Brigadier Reginald Rodwell going to be next? And why, instead of sending the reinforcements he badly needed, had his commanders told him to pretend that he had been promoted to major general?

Two years later, in 1943, Allied pilots flying along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa received a strange order from their superiors. If they were heading west, they were to maintain radio silence. But if they were going east, they should broadcast freely. What did it mean?

The man behind both of these mysterious directives was Dudley Clarke, a small, round-faced British Army officer in his early 40s. Clarke could often be found at the upscale Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo. Everyone there knew him, and he was usually in the bar, ready with a cocktail and a joke. But few who asked Clarke for clarification on the fake promotion in Cyprus, the radio order for the pilots or similarly unexpected commands received satisfying answers. Instead, he’d just avoid the question by telling a funny story.

In fact, anyone who asked around would soon learn that no one seemed to know what Clarke’s job was. It was something hush-hush, apparently. It must have been important. Back in London, he’d sat with Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the British generals running the war. Here in Cairo, he was reporting directly to the commander in chief, though for some reason, he didn’t work at headquarters. Instead, his office was in a block a little distance away, a location shared with a brothel. If some of his colleagues disapproved, Clarke didn’t mind. He thought the location was funny.

By the end of the war, Clarke had risen to the rank of brigadier, and he was highly praised. “His mental ingenuity, balance, resource, 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,” wrote one of his commanders in 1943, without specifying what those results were or how they had been delivered.

That aura of mystery persisted for the rest of Clarke’s life. When he died in May 1974 at age 75, the moment seemed barely worth noting. The London Times carried a two-paragraph obituary. And then, a couple of weeks later, the newspaper published an anonymous letter. Those who served with Clarke, it stated, “cannot let his death pass without paying tribute” to the man who ran “the most successfully secret of the ‘secret organizations’ in Cairo” during World War II.

The organization in question had a name that, like its commander, was at once glamorous and mysterious. Officially called Advanced Headquarters “A” Force but generally known as A Force, the work the department did would influence how the Allies fought the entire war.

Clarke’s business was deception, making the Nazis believe things that weren’t true. It wasn’t an original idea. Military commanders have always tried to fool their opponents. But no one ever imagined it was possible to deceive the enemy at the level Clarke did. As the war went on, he realized he could persuade the Nazis that the Allies had vast forces at their disposal, when, in truth, those units didn’t exist.

It wasn’t a matter of a dummy tank here or there: Clarke and his people created whole armies, naval fleets and bomber groups. These were forces that could be found nowhere except in the meticulous files of A Force and, crucially, in German intelligence reports.

Sometimes, it was as simple as rebadging something. A brigade headquarters was told to sign off messages as though it was a division (a larger unit made up of several brigades). A unit that did exist was classified as part of a larger unit that didn’t.

In the early years of the war, with the Allies retreating in multiple theaters, the first priority was defense, making weak forces look strong to dissuade the enemy from attacking. That was the story behind the strange messages to Cyprus.

Realizing that enemy intelligence officers were groping in the dark to build up pictures of British troops, Clarke decided to feed them misleading clues. Giving Rodwell a higher rank implied he had more men under his command on the Mediterranean island. “The number of major generals,” Clarke later joked, “… is a fair guide as to the number of troops in one place.”

As the tide of the war turned in the Allies’ favor in the second half of 1942, the focus was on offense. How could the Allies persuade the Nazis to move troops out of the way and reassign them to places where they weren’t actually needed? Once again, Clarke’s fake forces came into play. He used them to create threats to the German line far from the real focus of attack. A truly global conflict made this a particularly powerful technique: Soldiers in the wrong trench can be moved when an attack comes further down the line; soldiers in the wrong country are harder to redeploy.

Take Norway. During the German occupation of the Scandinavian country, the Nazis had around 300,000 troops stationed there—three times the number they believed they needed to maintain control of the neutral nation. The force was there to defend against an attack by an Allied army that the Nazis were convinced was sitting in Scotland. The Allies didn’t intend to launch their invasion of Europe via Norway, but the deceivers had made it seem like this was a concrete possibility.

Some of the Allies’ covert operations later became famous. In 1943, British intelligence planted what appeared to be the corpse of a British officer off the coast of Spain. The body held documents that suggested the Allies were planning to focus their attacks that year on Sardinia and Greece, rather than Sicily, the real target.

Operation Mincemeat, as the successful mission was called, has been the subject of two films and a stage musical. What these productions ignore, however, is that this deception was only possible because Clarke had already persuaded German intelligence that the Allies had far more troops in North Africa than they really did. If the Germans had had an accurate estimate, they would have known the Allies were utterly incapable of launching invasions on the scale that Mincemeat described.

Clarke thought of himself as putting on a show, talking about scripts, props, lighting and actors. And the show he was putting on was of a very particular kind. Clarke’s uncle, Sidney W. Clarke, had been one of Britain’s leading amateur magicians. Now, his nephew was putting on the largest magic show the world had ever seen. His stage? The entire theater of war.

Operation Mincemeat | Official Trailer | Netflix

Clarke had a mixed bag of tricks. What about those strange orders to pilots? He knew the enemy listened to radio traffic to locate troops. By allowing the planes flying east to use their radios but not the planes flying west, he was suggesting large movements in one direction, helping to support the story he was telling of a big army in Egypt. Thanks to both intercepted documents and Allied efforts to break German codes, he could see that the enemy was accepting the stories he was telling as truth.

Some of Clarke’s imaginary units would eventually become real. Aware that the enemy was worried about paratroopers in North Africa, but also aware that Britain barely had any there, Clarke decided he would create a fake outfit to play on the Axis powers’ nerves.

He decided to call it the Special Air Service (SAS), and he diligently set about creating clues that hinted at its existence, sending two soldiers to wander Cairo with parachute wings sewn onto their uniforms and taking a train journey alongside a known Japanese spy while wearing an “Airborne” patch on his uniform. A few months later, a young British officer came to Clarke, seeking his help in setting up a guerrilla force. Clarke promised his support, so long as the officer called the unit the SAS. It has since become Britain’s most famous regiment.

The summit of Allied deception came in June 1944, when intelligence officers persuaded the Nazis that the Normandy landings were a feint, designed to draw defenders away from the real target farther north at Calais. The mission relied on false information passed by double agents, fake wireless traffic and dummy units.

All of these misdirects were planned by people who had been trained by Clarke, using techniques he had perfected in the Middle East. The Allies didn’t have nearly enough troops for a second landing, so a fake force was created in the south of England: the First U.S. Army Group. To give the unit credibility, the very real General George S. Patton, who was being kept away from the Normandy invasion because he was in disgrace for slapping shellshocked soldiers, was appointed its commander. It was a story likely to appeal to Adolf Hitler, who believed Patton to be the best Allied military leader.

After the war, Clarke was forbidden from talking about his work, even as others did, sometimes taking credit for things his team had done. This frustrated him, partly because, like any showman, he would have enjoyed a little time in the limelight, and partly because he argued that it was impossible to understand the grand strategy of the war without understanding the role of deception. Then again, the officer had been so good at keeping secrets that even during the war, very few people understood what he’d done.

After the conflict, Clarke’s work was forgotten, as were the lessons he’d learned: that it is never too early to start misleading your opponent about your own strength, and that it doesn’t matter what you make your opponent think—what’s important is what you make them do. Clarke became an obscure figure who appeared briefly in other people’s memoirs. Even when the files on his war were declassified in 2013, few people noticed. I first came across him while researching someone else, and I quickly realized that his was a story worth telling.

Clarke thought of deception as a new kind of weapon, and he was particularly proud that, by keeping enemy forces tied down far from the action, his weapon had saved their lives, as well as lives on his own side. They would never know it, but there were Germans who owed their survival of World War II to a funny little man in the bar of Shepheard’s Hotel.

Adapted from The Illusionist: The True Story of The Man Who Fooled Hitler by Robert Hutton. Published by Pegasus Books. Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved.