NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime

by Ben MacIntyre

  The Spanish authorities assured Britain that Turner’s corpse had “not been tampered with.” Scientists were flown out to Gibraltar, and the body and letter were subjected to minute examination. The four seals holding down the envelope flap had been opened, apparently by the effect of the seawater, and the writing was still “quite legible” despite immersion for at least twelve hours. But some forensic spy craft suggested the Allies could relax. On opening Turner’s coat to take out the letter in his breast pocket, the scientists noticed that sand fell out of the eyes in the buttons and the button holes, having been rubbed into the coat when the body washed up on the beach. “It was highly unlikely,” the British concluded, “that any agent would have replaced the sand when rebuttoning the jacket.” The German spies operating in Spain were good, but not that good. The secret was safe.

  Yet British suspicions were not without foundation. Another victim of the Catalina air crash was Louis Daniélou, an intelligence officer with the Free French Forces code-named “Clamorgan,” who was on a mission for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the covert British organization operating behind enemy lines. Daniélou had been carrying his notebook and a document, written in French and dated September 22, that referred, albeit vaguely, to British attacks on targets in North Africa. Intercepted and decoded wireless messages indicated that this information had indeed been passed on to the Germans: “All the documents, which included a list of prominent personalities [i.e., agents] in North Africa and possibly information with regard to our organisations there, together with a notebook, have been photostatted and come into the hands of the enemy.” An unnamed Italian agent had obtained the copied documents and handed them on to the Germans, who mistakenly accorded the information “no greater importance than any other bit of intelligence.” The Germans may also have suspected the “documents had likely been planted as a deception.”

  An important item of military intelligence had washed into German hands from the Atlantic; luckily, its significance had eluded them. “This suggested that the Spanish could be relied on to pass on what they found, and that this unneutral habit might be turned to account.” Here was evidence of a most ingenious avenue into German thinking, an alluring fly to cast on the water.

  The incident had rattled the wartime intelligence chiefs, but in the corkscrew mind of one intelligence officer it lodged and remained. That mind belonged to one Charles Christopher Cholmondeley, a twenty-five-year-old flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force, seconded to MI5, the Security Service. Cholmondeley (pronounced “Chumly”) was one of nature’s more notable eccentrics but a most effective warrior in this strange and complicated war. Cholmondeley gazed at the world through thick, round spectacles, from behind a remarkable mustache fully six inches long and waxed into magnificent points. Over six feet three inches tall, with size twelve feet, he never quite seemed to fit his uniform and walked with a strange, loping gait, “lifting his toes as he walked.”

  Cholmondeley longed for adventure. As a schoolboy at Canford School, he had joined the Public Schools Exploring Society on expeditions to Finland and Newfoundland to map as-yet-uncharted territory. Living under canvas, he had survived on Kendal Mint Cake, discovered a new species of shrew that died inside his sleeping bag, and enjoyed every moment. He studied geography at Oxford, joined the Officers’ Training Corps, and in 1938 applied, unsuccessfully, to the Sudan Service. He briefly worked for the King’s Messengers, the corps of couriers carrying messages to embassies and consulates around the world that was often seen as a stepping-stone to an intelligence career. The most distinguished of Cholmondeley’s ancestors was his maternal grandfather, Charles Leyland, whose gift to the world was the Leyland cypress, or leylandii, cause of countless suburban hedge disputes. Cholmondeley had a more glamorous future in mind: he dreamed of becoming a spy, a soldier, or at least a colonial official in some far-flung and exotic land. One brother, Richard, died fighting at Dunkirk, further firing Charles’s determination to find action, excitement, and, if necessary, a hero’s death.

  Cholmondeley had the mind of an adventurer, but not the body, nor the luck. He was commissioned a pilot officer in November 1939, but his poor eyesight meant he would never fly a plane, even if a cockpit could have been found to accommodate his ungainly shape. “This was a terrible blow,” according to his sister. So far from soaring heroically into the heights, as he had hoped, Cholmondeley was grounded for the duration of the war, his long legs cramped under a desk. This might have blunted the ambitions of a lesser man, but Cholmondeley instead poured his imagination and energies into covert work.

  By 1942, he had risen to the rank of flight lieutenant (temporary) in the RAF’s Intelligence and Security Department, seconded to MI5. Tommy Argyll Robertson (universally known as “Tar” on account of his initials), the MI5 chief who headed the B1A, a section of British intelligence that ran captured enemy spies as double agents, recruited Cholmondeley as an “ideas man,” describing him as “extraordinary and delightful.” When off duty, Cholmondeley restored antique cars, studied the mating habits of insects, and hunted partridge with a revolver. Cholmondeley was courtly and correct and almost pathologically shy and secretive. He cut a distinctive figure around Whitehall, his arms flapping when animated, hopping along the pavement like a huge, flightless, myopic bird. But, for all his peculiarities, Cholmondeley was a most remarkable espionage thinker.

  Some of Cholmondeley’s ideas were harebrained in the extreme. He had, in the words of a fellow intelligence officer, “one of those subtle and ingenious minds which is forever throwing up fantastic ideas—mostly so ingenious as either to be impossible of implementation or so intricate as to render their efficacy problematical, but every now and again quite brilliant in their simplicity.” Cholmondeley’s role, like that of Ian Fleming at Naval Intelligence, was to imagine the unimaginable and try to lure the truth toward it. More formally, he was secretary of the top secret XX Committee, or Twenty Committee, the group in charge of overseeing the exploitation of double agents, so-called because the two roman numerals formed a pleasing pun as a double-cross. (The name may also have been an ironic tribute to Charlie Chaplin, whose The Great Dictator, a film released in 1940, features a dictator operating under an “XX” flag, mimicking a swastika.) Under the chairmanship of John Masterman, a dry and ascetic Oxford don, the Twenty Committee met every Thursday in the MI5 offices at 58 St. James’s Street to discuss the double-agent system run by Tar Robertson, explore new deception plans, and plot how to pass the most usefully damaging information to the enemy. Its members included representatives of navy, army, and air intelligence, as well as MI5 and MI6. As secretary and MI5 representative at this weekly gathering of high-powered spooks, Cholmondeley was privy to some of the most secret plans of the war. He had read the 1939 memo from Godfrey and Fleming containing the “not very nice” suggestion of using a dead body to convey false information. The Catalina crash off Cadiz proved that such a plan might work.

  On October 31, 1942, just one month after the retrieval of Lieutenant Turner’s body from the Spanish beach, Cholmondeley presented the Twenty Committee with his own idea, under the code name “Trojan Horse,” which he described as “a plan for introducing documents of a highly secret nature into the hands of the enemy.” It was, in essence, an expanded version of the plan outlined in the Trout Memo:

  A body is obtained from one of the London hospitals (normal peacetime price ten pounds); it is then dressed in army, naval, or air force uniform of suitable rank. The lungs are filled with water and the documents are disposed in an inside pocket. The body is then dropped by a Coastal Command aircraft at a suitable position where the set of the currents will probably carry the body ashore in enemy territory. On the body’s being found, the supposition in the enemy’s mind may well be that one of Britain’s aircraft has been either shot or forced down and that this is one of the passengers. While the courier cannot be sure to get through, if he does succeed, information in the form of the documents can be of a far more
secret nature than it would be possible to introduce through any normal B1A channel.

  Human agents or double agents can be tortured or turned, forced to reveal the falsity of the information they carried. A dead body would never talk.

  Like most of Cholmondeley’s ideas, this one was both exquisitely simple and fiendishly problematic. Having outlined his blueprint for building a latter-day Trojan Horse, Cholmondeley now set about poking holes in it. An autopsy might reveal that the corpse had not died from drowning, or the plane carrying out “the drop” might be intercepted. Even if a suitable body could be found, it would have to be made to “double for an actual officer.” One member of the Twenty Committee pointed out that if a corpse was dropped out of a plane at any height, it would undoubtedly be damaged, “and injuries inflicted after death can always be detected.” If the body was placed in a location where it would wash into enemy or enemy-occupied territory, such as Norway or France, there was every possibility of “a full and capable post-mortem” by German scientists. Catholic countries, however, had a traditional aversion to autopsies, and Spain and Portugal, although neutral, were both leaning toward the Axis: “Of these, Spain was clearly the country where the probability of documents being handed, or at the very least shown to the Germans, was greater.”

  Cholmondeley’s idea was both new and very old. Indeed, the unsubtle choice of code name shows how far back in history this ruse runs. Odysseus may have been the first to offer an attractive gift to the enemy containing a most unpleasant surprise, but he had many imitators. In intelligence jargon, the technique of planting misleading information by means of a faked accident even has a formal name: the “haversack ruse.”

  The haversack ruse was the brainchild of Richard Meinertzhagen, ornithologist, anti-Semitic Zionist, big-game hunter, fraud, and British spy. In The Seven Pillars of Wisdom T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), Meinertzhagen’s contemporary, offered a pen portrait of this extraordinary and extraordinarily nasty man: “Meinertzhagen knew no half measures. He was logical, an idealist of the deepest, and so possessed by his convictions that he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of good. He was a strategist, a geographer, and a silent laughing masterful man; who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with his African knob-kerri. His instincts were abetted by an immensely powerful body and a savage brain.”

  In 1917, a British army under General Sir Edmund Allenby twice attacked the Turks at Gaza but found the way to Jerusalem blocked by a strong enemy force. Allenby decided that he should launch his next offensive at Beersheba in the east, while hoping to fool the Turks into expecting another attack on Gaza (which was the most logical target). The officer in control of the deception was Major Richard Meinertzhagen, on Allenby’s intelligence staff.

  Meinertzhagen knew that the key to an effective deceit is not merely to conceal what you are doing but to persuade the other side that what you are doing is the reverse of what you are actually doing. He stuffed a haversack with false documents, a diary, and twenty pounds in cash and smeared it with his horse’s blood. He then rode out into no-man’s-land until shot at by a Turkish mounted patrol, upon which he slumped in the saddle as if wounded, dropped his haversack, binoculars, and rifle, and galloped back to the British lines. One of the letters (written by Meinertzhagen’s sister Mary) purported to be from the haversack owner’s wife, reporting the birth of their son. It was pure Edwardian schmaltz: “Good-bye, my darling! Nurse says I must not tire myself by writing too much.… Baby sends a kiss to Daddy!” Meinertzhagen now mounted an operation to make it seem as if a feverish search was under way for the missing bag. A sandwich, wrapped in a daily order referring to the missing documents, was planted near enemy lines, as if dropped by a careless patrol. Meinertzhagen was ordered to appear before a (nonexistent) court of inquiry to explain the lost haversack.

  The Turks duly concentrated their forces at Gaza and redeployed two divisions away from Beersheba. On October 31, 1917, the British attacked again, rolling back the thin Turkish line at Beersheba. By December, the British had taken Jerusalem. Meinertzhagen crowed that his haversack ruse had been “easy, reliable and inexpensive.” But victory may also be attributed to another devious Meinertzhagen ploy: the dropping of hundreds of cigarettes laced with opium behind Turkish lines. Some historians have argued that the haversack ruse was not quite the success Meinertzhagen claimed. The Turks may have been fooled. Or they may just have been fantastically stoned.

  The ruse had already been updated and deployed during the Second World War. Before the battle of Alam Halfa in 1942, a corpse was placed in a blown-up scout car, clutching a map that appeared to show a “fair going” route through the desert, in the hope of misdirecting Rommel’s tanks into soft sand, where they might get bogged down. In another variation on the theme, a fake defense plan for Cyprus was left with a woman in Cairo who was known to be in contact with Axis intelligence. The most recent variant had been plotted, with pleasing symmetry, by Peter Fleming, Ian Fleming’s older brother, an intelligence officer serving under General Archibald Wavell, then Supreme Allied Commander in the Far East. Peter, who shared his brother’s vivid imagination and was already a successful writer, concocted his own haversack ruse, code-named “Error,” aimed at convincing the Japanese that Wavell himself had been injured in the retreat from Burma and had left behind various important documents in an abandoned car. In April 1942, the fake documents, a photograph of Wavell’s daughter, personal letters, novels, and other items were placed in a green Ford sedan and pushed over a slope at a bridge across the Irrawaddy River, just ahead of the advancing Japanese army. Operation Error had been great fun, but “there was never any evidence that the Japanese had paid any attention to the car, much less that they drew any conclusions from its contents.”

  This was the central problem with the haversack ruse: it was deeply embedded in intelligence folklore, the source of many an after-dinner anecdote, but there was precious little proof that it had ever actually worked.

  Table of Contents

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Epigraph

  Chapter One - The Elopement

  Chapter Two - A Fine War

  Chapter Three - The Manhattan Mob

  Chapter Four - The Professionals

  Chapter Five - The Robbers’ Bride

  Chapter Six - An American Bar in Paris

  Chapter Seven - The Duchess

  Chapter Eight - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Worth

  Chapter Nine - Cold Turkey

  Chapter Ten - A Great Lady Holds a Reception

  Chapter Eleven - A Courtship and a Kidnapping

  Chapter Twelve - A Wanted Woman

  Photo Insert 1

  Chapter Thirteen - My Fair Lady

  Chapter Fourteen - Kitty Flynn, Society Queen

  Chapter Fifteen - Dishonor Among Thieves

  Chapter Sixteen - Rough Diamonds

  Chapter Seventeen - A Silk Glove Man

  Chapter Eighteen - Bootless Footpads

  Chapter Nineteen - Worth’s Waterloo

  Chapter Twenty - The Trial

  Chapter Twenty-one - Gentleman in Chains

  Chapter Twenty-two - Le Brigand International

  Chapter Twenty-three - Alias Moriarty

  Chapter Twenty-four - Atonement

  Photo Insert 2

  Chapter Twenty-five - Moriarty Confesses to Holmes

  Chapter Twenty-six - The Bellboy’s Burden

  Chapter Twenty-seven - Pierpont Morgan, the Napoleon of Wall Street

  Chapter Twenty-eight - Return of the Prodigal Duchess

  Chapter Twenty-nine - Nemo’s Grave

  Epilogue: The Inheritors

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Excerpt from Operation Mincemeat

  nbsp;

  Ben MacIntyre, NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime