Dudley Clarke: the spy who hoodwinked Hitler

Dummy tanks at El Alamein. Bogus generals in Algiers. Sham armies on D-Day. All were ruses masterminded by Dudley Clarke. Robert Hutton tells the story of the British soldier who made an art form of duping the Nazis

A dummy Bofors gun and crew in north Africa – among the ploys used to deceive Axis intelligence about the true location of massed Allied forces before the battle of El Alamein. (Photo by Alamy)

Published: September 19, 2024 at 4:42 PM

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Hans-Otto Behrendt stared at the map in front of him and tried to think, despite the fierce Egyptian heat. A few miles to the east, 100,000 of his fellow German and Italian soldiers were waiting in the desert, facing almost twice as many Allied troops. The opposing armies were stretched out in parallel lines about 40 miles long, running from the Mediterranean coast in the north down to the Qattara Depression in the south, impassable to vehicles. It was only a matter of time, Behrendt knew, before those Allied troops launched their attack. As intelligence officer to the German commander, Erwin Rommel, it was his job to work out when it would come – and where.

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The date was 23 October 1942. For the previous two years, Axis and Allied forces had pursued each other back and forth across north Africa. At one time or another, each side had thought it was on the point of victory – only for the tide to turn. A few months earlier, Behrendt had believed he might be about to witness the capture of Egypt. Axis forces had been barely a day away from Cairo, where panicking British soldiers and officials had been preparing to fight to the death or flee, piling civilians onto trains and burning vast tranches of secret documents. But, after months of retreats, the Allied armies had somehow held out. And Axis forces, short of fuel and ammunition – short of everything, in fact – had been unable to strike the decisive blow. Now it was the turn of the enemy to push for victory. Troops from across the British empire had dug into the sand, waiting for their new commander, Bernard Montgomery, to give the word.

Behrendt was surprised they had waited so long. His commander agreed: “If I were Montgomery, we would not be here anymore,” Rommel had remarked to him. The one comfort the young intelligence officer could take was that there was no way that anyone could launch a surprise attack in the desert. When the Allies came, he would know about it. Confident in his forces’ intelligence, Rommel had returned to Europe to recuperate from the strain of desert warfare. He would be summoned when he was needed.

The German officer poring over photographs and maps had been watching a magic trick – the greatest the world had seen

Examining the reconnaissance photos, Behrendt was convinced that the Allies weren’t in any hurry. They were constructing some kind of pipeline towards the southern end of their line, probably to carry water, which was barely halfway completed. There were supply dumps appearing in the south as well – always a telltale clue about where an attack would come. True, a large number of trucks were parked at the northern end of the line, about 25 miles back from the front, but they hadn’t moved for weeks.

Farther back was an armoured brigade that had appeared a few days earlier, still well to the rear. That would surely be part of Montgomery’s assault force, but it wasn’t yet in place. Behrendt would keep an eye on that brigade, certainly, but it looked as if the attack
was going to be in the south – and, it seemed, wasn’t imminent. The general report for the day was brief: “Enemy situation unchanged. Quiet all day along the front.”

That evening, at 9.40pm, the British artillery opened fire with a barrage heavier than anything yet seen in the desert war: around 1,000 guns firing right along the length of the front. It was so loud and relentless that even some of those firing the guns panicked. To
those on the receiving end, it was sheer hell – an endless rain of high explosive. The second battle of El Alamein – a clash that would transform Allied fortunes in the desert war – was under way. Not that the Germans knew it.

Unexpected assault. At headquarters, Behrendt and his fellow officers tried to work out what was happening. Communications from the frontline were confused and sporadic. Hundreds of tanks and thousands of troops were advancing. It was clear that the attack had been launched – but where was the main blow going to fall? And how, Behrendt wondered, had the Allies managed to launch a surprise attack in a desert that didn’t offer enough cover to hide a platoon, let alone whole divisions?

What Behrendt couldn’t have guessed is that, as he’d sat poring over photographs and maps, reading reports from forward observers, he’d been watching a magic trick – the greatest the world had ever seen. That pipeline he’d noted? It was a dummy, made of petrol
cans hammered flat. The supply dumps nearby? Dyed bits of hessian, flat on the ground, designed to look authentic in aerial photographs. Both of these stunts had been staged to catch his eye. And that wasn’t all. The parked trucks farther north that he’d dismissed were in fact carefully designed stage props, codenamed ‘Sunshields’: frames made out of cloth and steel sitting on top of barrels. During the nights before the attack, an entire armoured corps had crept forward, unit by unit, and secured the frames on top of their tanks so that they looked like trucks. In the place where they had been waiting, other teams assembled dummy tanks to replace the real vehicles that had advanced. So when the sun came up each morning, it seemed to Axis observers that those tanks had never moved. A magician calls the chat they use to distract and mislead their audience ‘patter’. In the north African desert, that ‘patter’ had taken the form of false intelligence whispers suggesting that no attack was imminent. A conference for senior generals had been organised in Tehran. Officers on the front line had sent telegrams back to Cairo, booking hotel rooms. A double agent in the city had reported that it was full of soldiers on leave.

This magic trick had been carefully designed to put Behrendt at his ease and focus his attention in the wrong place in the days before the battle at El Alamein. But what almost no one, even among the Allies, fully grasped was that it was merely a single trick in a vast global illusion show that had already been running for more than a year and would last the rest of the war. And it had all emerged from the mind of one very unusual man.

If you’ve heard of Dudley Clarke, it’s probably because of the BBC drama SAS: Rogue Heroes, in which Dominic West played him as a louche, cross-dressing spy, lounging round his Cairo office in a Chanel gown. For most of the past 80 years, Clarke has been an obscure, largely forgotten character. Occasionally he would pop up in the memoirs of more famous people: a mysterious figure in a camel-hair coat, on the fringes of important events, doing a job that no one quite understood. But the few who did understand his role were under no illusions.

“He is irreplaceable,” wrote General Harold Alexander in 1943, when he was commanding Allied forces in north Africa. Clarke had, he thought, “contributed more to the successful operations in the Middle East than probably any other officer of his rank”. That was quite a claim, and it leads to an obvious question: what actually was it that Clarke had done?

From soldier to spy

Born in 1899, Clarke had joined the army during the First World War so, by the time the Second World War began, he had been in uniform for most of his life. He’d served in the artillery and the Royal Flying Corps, but had found his niche as an aide to generals. He was the man to whom you gave unusual assignments – an original thinker who, if he sometimes seemed on the verge of insubordination, could be relied upon to solve problems you hadn’t yet considered.

When it was feared that the Nazis might invade Ireland in 1940, it was Clarke who was sent, in absolute secrecy, to liaise with Dublin. In the days after the evacuation of Dunkirk, Clarke was one of the driving forces behind the idea of creating small independent fighting units that could strike behind enemy lines and then disappear. He even came up with a name for them: Commandos.

Towards the end of 1940, Clarke was summoned to Cairo, where he was asked to turn his mind to deceiving the enemy. He started out small, inventing fake units here and there: the first was an imaginary parachute unit that he’d christened the Special Air Service (SAS). The story of the SAS began in early 1941, when Clarke was handed an extract from the diary of a captured Italian officer, which showed that, months earlier, Italian forces had been warned that British paratroopers were operating in their area. In fact, as Clarke knew better than most, the British had only just formed their first parachute unit back in England. But if the enemy was worried about something, he could play on that fear.

By the end of the war, the Allies had created 160 false units, including a fake army group and an entire fake carrier fleet

So Clarke set about imagining his ideal parachute unit. It would be equipped with the best kit – for a while, he even considered giving it helicopters. The unit was now – according to his myth – training in the Transjordan desert: far enough away to be hard to check, but close enough to be threatening. Clarke began spreading rumours about the unit’s existence, even dressing up two soldiers as airborne troops and sending them round Cairo to be noticed by people who might pass gossip to the enemy. This imaginary unit would be called, he decided, the 1st Special Air Service Battalion.

A few months later, Clarke was visiting his friend David Stirling in hospital, where the latter was recovering after a parachute jump had gone wrong. They discussed Clarke’s vision of the Commandos as a small, independent raiding force, and Stirling outlined his own plan to form a similar unit. He asked for Clarke’s support, and got it – on one condition. It would be helpful, Clarke said, if Stirling’s unit was called the Special Air Service, to put flesh on the bones of the deception he was already running. As an additional touch, he suggested calling the first recruits ‘L Detachment’, implying the existence of detachments A to K. A legend was about to be born.

Gaming the numbers

Over the course of 1941, the British situation in the Middle East grew more desperate –and Clarke grew more ambitious. Keen to persuade the Germans that the defending force on Cyprus was stronger than it actually was, he asked London to announce that the commanding officer, previously a brigadier, was now a major-general. The Germans knew that a major-general usually commanded a division – four times the number of troops stationed on the island – and Clarke hoped they would thus conclude that this was how many soldiers were stationed on Cyprus.

The team ran double agents around the Mediterranean, feeding false narratives back to the enemy

To Clarke, such battle deception – inflating German estimates of the size of Allied forces around the world – was “the basis of everything” he achieved. It was this modus operandi that later made it possible to persuade the enemy that, even after D-Day, the Allies had forces ready to invade Calais and Norway. It involved years of painstaking work involving false names for units, dummy equipment and misleading communications. By the end of the war, the Allies had created 160 false units, including a fake army group and an entire fake carrier fleet. And his efforts clearly worked: one captured enemy general expressed bafflement that the Allies had yet to throw these forces into the fight. Like any good magician, Clarke used a variety of techniques. His team, the enigmatically named ‘A Force’, planted stories in
newspapers, built dummy tanks and aircraft for reconnaissance planes to photograph, left false documents across the Middle East and Turkey in the hope that they would be passed to enemy agents, and ran a network of double agents around the Mediterranean feeding
false narratives back to the enemy.

By September 1941, Clarke felt that he was getting to grips with the methods and possibilities of deception; now he wanted to put them to work at scale. Sitting in Cairo, he had conceived an idea that was breathtaking in its ambition, and headed to London to make his pitch to the men running Britain’s war. They’d got wind of what he’d been up to, and wanted to hear more – but they couldn’t have guessed what Clarke was going to propose.

First, he talked them through his methods. Never give the enemy the whole story in one go, he declared; instead, pass him snippets of information and let him work out how it fitted together. “The enemy must be left to build up a jigsaw puzzle himself,” Clarke explained. If an intelligence officer thought he had worked something out for himself, he was much more likely to believe in it. Then he told them his idea. Rather than deploy piecemeal deceptions ahead of individual battles, the Allies should coordinate
their misleading work. “All lies, however big, must themselves form pieces in one grand jigsaw puzzle,” he concluded. “The basis of all future deception should be a completely bogus plan for winning the war.”

Distract and deceive

Deception is, of course, as old as warfare – it’s in the myth of the Trojan Horse. But what Clarke was describing was something quite new. It was not simply a question of whether an attack was going to come on the left flank or the right, but whether it would come in Norway or France, through Italy or via the Balkans. This had never before been a possibility, because war had never previously been fought on such a scale. That scale created new opportunities. Soldiers in a trench can quickly move to respond when an attack comes in an unexpected spot nearby. But armies stationed in the wrong country are useless.

The generals, weary of defeat after two years of setbacks, agreed to set up an overarching deception organisation to match the one Clarke had created in Egypt. This became the London Controlling Section, and it ran the D-Day deceptions.

At this moment of personal triumph, though, Clarke was about to do something that would put everything he’d built at risk. A week after he left London to return to Cairo, he was arrested in Madrid – dressed “down to a brassiere, as a woman”.

It was a terrible moment. In October 1941, sitting in a police cell in Franco-led Spain, Clarke probably knew more about British intelligence operations than anyone else outside London. If German intelligence had thought to grab him, an interrogator might have learned crucial facts. Fortunately for him and for the Allies, that didn’t happen.

The reasons for this escapade have never been explained. Probably, as both the Spaniards and the British suspected, Clarke had done it simply because he enjoyed dressing as a woman. But files at the National Archives in Kew offer intriguing hints that it might have been part of an effort to recruit a German intelligence officer to pass false information back to Berlin. It may even have been thanks to German intelligence that Clarke was set free: the Axis spies seem to have believed that he was ready to work for them, so the Germans may have pushed for his release. In any case, he was swiftly whisked to Gibraltar.

For a while, it looked as if Clarke’s war might be over, but his commanders rated him so highly that they fought to get him back to work. That effort was to be vindicated: subsequent deception successes prior to assaults at El Alamein in 1942 and in Sicily in 1943 meant there was little difficulty persuading the people running the war that D-Day should get the same treatment. The efforts to persuade the Germans that the Allies would land at Calais are now well known, but what’s less appreciated is that they were drawn up by men trained by Clarke, using techniques he’d perfected in the Middle East.

After the war, Clarke retreated into obscurity. For a while he worked in opinion polling for the Conservative party. He penned a novel, a history and a memoir, but was forbidden from writing about his work in Cairo. The result was that, whereas some parts of Britain’s deception war became well known, the full scale of it – which very few people grasped even at the time – was rarely understood.

When Clarke died in 1974, The Times’ obituary ran to no more than two paragraphs. The man who’d pulled off the biggest magic trick in history had been so successful that almost no one realised what he’d done.

The fog of war: 4 of Dudley Clarke's greatest deceptions

DOUBLE TROUBLE FOR THE NAZIS

In 1941, Renato Levi – an Italian Jew who had been recruited to spy for the Germans – arrived in Cairo. What his masters didn’t know was that he was a double agent working for the British. Returning to his German controllers a few months later, he told them that he’d left in Egypt a recruit who would communicate with them by radio. This recruit was entirely fictional; instead, a British wireless operator was sending signals drafted by Clarke’s team. Codenamed ‘Cheese’, Clarke’s ruse became the longest-running double agent operation of the war, assisting in deceptions from 1941 until after D-Day.

MAKING A DUMMY OF ROMMEL

In early 1942, as German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel advanced across the desert, Clarke was asked to slow down the enemy commander. Clarke wanted to suggest that the Allies were far stronger than they were – but, not only were they running low on real tanks, they were even running out of dummies. However, Clarke knew that the Germans hid their tanks under Bedouin tents – so he set up tents of his own, and put one of the few remaining dummies under one of them, its barrel pointing out a little way. The Allies knew they’d fooled the enemy when the Luftwaffe bombed the fake camp.

MINCEMEAT’S BIG BROTHER

The most famous part of the 1943 plot to divert Axis attention away from Allied plans to invade Sicily was Operation Mincemeat: fake plans were planted on a corpse that was then set adrift off the Spanish coast for the Germans to pick up. But this was just one element of a much larger deception plan: Operation Barclay. This involved a team led by Clarke spreading rumours and leaving clues that there would be invasions of both Greece and Sardinia, but not Sicily. It was thanks to Clarke’s work inflating German estimates of Allied forces that Nazi intelligence believed such a two-pronged assault was possible. Meanwhile, Commando operations against targets in Greece made an attack there seem imminent.

THE FOOL MONTY

Watching a film in early 1944, Clarke noticed that one of the actors bore a striking resemblance to British General Bernard Montgomery – and was inspired. At the time, the deceivers wanted to mislead the enemy about the timing of the invasion of France. Clarke proposed that a false Monty should be seen somewhere far from England in the days before the planned assault. So for Operation Copperhead, immortalised in the film I Was Monty’s Double, another actor, ME Clifton James, pretended to be the general – and dropped false hints within earshot of German spies in Gibraltar and Algiers.

Robert Hutton is an author and freelance journalist. He is the author of The Illusionist: The True Story of the Man Who Fooled Hitler

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This article was first published in the September 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

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